evolution
razib | December 9, 2008Article in The New Scientist, Neanderthal genome already giving up its secrets. I went to a talk by Svante Paabo recently where he played up expectations in the near future.
grrlscientist | December 9, 2008tags: encephalon, brain, behavior, cognition, neurobiology, neuroscience, blog carnival
The last frontier: The brain.
Image: Orphaned. Contact me so I can provide credit and linkage.
Welcome to Encephalon! This is the blogosphere's neuroscience blog carnival that focuses specifically upon the brain, neuroscience, perception and behavior. If you sent me an essay or video about the brain and its relationship to behavior, perception, cognition, or learning, then it is included here! Also, please accept my sincerest apologies for the one day delay in publishing Encephalon: a police action in…
cmooney | December 9, 2008When our lame outgoing president suggested teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in science classes back in (I think) 2005, I like many was outraged. But Bush's recent comments in one of his outgoing legacy saving interviews put the issue in a somewhat different light:
MCFADDEN: Is it literally true, the Bible?
BUSH: You know. Probably not ... No, I'm not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it, but I do think that the New Testament, for example is ... has got ... You know, the important lesson is "God sent a son."
MCFADDEN: So, you can read the Bible...
BUSH: That God…
grrlscientist | December 9, 2008tags: evolution, biogeography, ornithology, birds, avian
Kolo Sunset.
Photo credit: Christopher E. Filardi, American Museum of Natural History
(Click on image for a larger picture).
Two of my ornithologist colleagues, Chris Filardi and Rob Moyle, published a paper in the top-tier research journal, Nature. This paper is especially exciting because it shows that oceanic islands are not necessarily the evolutionary "dead ends" that they have traditionally been portrayed to be. In fact, Chris and Rob's data show that a group of birds have actually accomplished what scientists had never…
pharyngula | December 9, 2008Here's an interesting example of genetic programming: use a program that slightly alters colored polygons, compares the results to a target, and selects variants that most resemble the Mona Lisa. After less than a million generations, a black square turned into this:
Not bad. The description of the algorithm is a bit thin, but he promises to release the source code soon. It sounds like a million generations is an overestimate, since his population size in each generation was 1, and it also sounds like his selection was far more stringent than you'd find in nature, but it's an interesting if…
razib | December 8, 2008T. Ryan Gregory is getting the word out that the latest issue of Evolution is free online.
evolvingthoughts | December 7, 2008Siris has an interesting piece on the nature of the liberal arts. I loves me some 13th century, I does.
Bora objects to Obama's choices being characterised as "elites" and therefore bad. On the other hand, the term "groupthink" was coined to characterise the elite advisors of the first American Camelot. And an open letter to Obama here on the failures of the Healthcare Information Technology proposals in the US. IT won't solve problems that aren't informational in nature.
PM of Notes from the Floating World discusses the constitutionality and sense of the proroguing of the Canadian Parliament…
grrlscientist | December 7, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
edyong | December 6, 2008
Since the time when humans and chimps evolved from our common ancestor, our species appears to have come on by leaps and bounds. We walk on two legs, we have spoken language and while there is no doubt that chimps are intelligent, there is even less doubt that our brainpower outclasses theirs.
But are our advanced abilities reflected in our genetics? After all, traits like intelligence and language give us great adaptive advantages - surely they should be mirrored by similarly large changes in our genome, compared to the chimp one?
Not so. Researchers at the University of Michigan sifted…
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2008
The General Ecosystems Thinking (GET) Group centred at Queensland University of Technology (or as we at UQ like to call it, the "city university") invited me to come give a talk on the ontology of evolution. I gave it yesterday. As it will be part of this series of posts that will end up as some form of publication, I thought you might like to hear my dulcet and husky tones, and read the incredible slide. If so, go here, or get the PDF slides here and the WMA sound here. Check out some of the other speakers too. Thanks to Marco Fahmi for the invite and shepherding.
The actual title was: "…
clock | December 5, 2008And blogging about! Obligatory readings of the day:
The Evolution of Poisonous Birds:
This research elegantly demonstrates that the evolution of just one character -- in this case, toxicity -- can profoundly affect the evolution of a suite of other characters, ranging from body size and behavioral traits to ecological niche.
Allen's Rule, Phenotypic Plasticity, and The Nature of Evolution:
Within species ... across clines or subspecies ... this raises very significant (and addressable) questions regarding adaptation in the genetic vs. the ontogenetic realms. If Allen's rule is primarily an…
grrlscientist | December 5, 2008tags: evolution, Phylogeny, ornithology, chemical defense, Batrachotoxin, poisonous birds, Pitohui, Ifrita, Pachycephalidae, New Guinea
The Hooded Pitohui, Pitohui dichrous,
endemic to New Guinea, is very unusual
because it has poisonous plumage and skin.
Image: John Dumbacher.
I have been in love with New Guinea since I first read about it as a kid. Everything about this tropical island is exotic and fascinating to me, from the large numbers of endemic bird and plant species to the tremendous number of spoken languages -- more than anywhere else on the planet. So I was immediately…
awild | December 5, 2008
Metrius contractus
Oregon, USA
Many biologists are familiar with the Bombardier Beetles in the ground beetle tribe Brachinini, as their defensive tactic of aiming an explosive spray has been studied extensively. The Brachinini are even celebrated by creationists as animals that couldn't possibly evolve.
As it turns out, though, bombardiers have evolved at least twice. The second, less known radiation comprises the subfamily Paussinae, also in the Carabidae, and as we'd expect from an independent origin the spray dispersing mechanism is different, using a flange instead of a nozzle. …
oracknows | December 4, 2008It may well be; Roger Ebert has finally gotten around to reviewing Expelled! Short version: He didn't like it.
Long version: He really, really didn't like it.
I knew there was a reason I liked Roger Ebert.
pharyngula | December 4, 2008Simon Ings has written a wonderful survey of the eye, called A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and it's another of those books you ought to be sticking on your Christmas lists right now. The title give you an idea of its content. It's a "natural history", so don't expect some dry exposition on deep details, but instead look forward to a light and readable exploration of the many facets of vision.
There is a discussion of the evolution of eyes, of course, but the topics are wide-ranging — Ings covers optics, chemistry, physiology, optical…
gregladen | December 3, 2008On Change.org, the site where you can submit ideas and/or vote on ideas and then Obama has to do them ... or at least listen ... a college student named Griffin Jeffrey has suggested that we create nationalliy required science standards.
National standards on the teaching of Evolution and the origins of life, decided on and created by top scientists from significant scientific organizations, should direct curricula of all schools nationwide, overriding any state laws on the subjects.
We want this. Go vote for it. Here.
razib | December 2, 2008Romania removes theory of evolution from school curriculum:
Romania's withdrawal of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum could be evidence of a growing conservative tendency in teaching. Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts children's understanding of how the world came into being.
Meanwhile, religious studies classes continue to tell Romanian children that God made the world in seven days.
The theory of the Origin of Species and the evolution of humans is no longer present in the compulsory curriculum, through a…
gregladen | December 2, 2008A new paper by Kevin Padian of UC Berkeley is just out in Comptes Rendus Biologies, a French peer reviewed journal, on American creationism.
Padian summarizes the history of creationism in the US. From the abstract:
The history of anti-evolutionism in the United States begins only in the early decades of the 20th century but has evolved considerably since then. Various versions of the movement ("equal time" for creationism, "creation science", "intelligent design") have developed over time, but they have made few positive contributions to serious discourse about science and religion. Their…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2008One of the key biological questions about antibiotic resistance is to what extent is the spread of resistance due to the evolution of new resistant strains versus the spread of existing resistant strains. With MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, it's been thought that epidemic spread of a few resistant genotypes (strains) is responsible for much of the increase in MRSA, as shown by this image of pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) done on a nationwide collection of MRSA:
(from here)
However, methods such as PFGE lack the genetic resolution to determine if gene transfer is…
oracknows | December 2, 2008Well, it looks as though I've stepped into it yet one more time.
Believe it or not, I hadn't intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I'll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when it was rumored that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might be chosen to be Secretary of the Interior or, even worse, Director of the EPA. Much to my surprise, I actually did manage to stir up a goodly amount of blogospheric reaction, too. Although I believed it to be a good cause, this…