evolution
evolvingthoughts | November 10, 2008
Here, by the incredibly young, handsome and way too successful Carl Zimmer, late of the Seed stable. Carl brings to mind my favourite Truman Capote saying:
It is not enough to succeed. Friends must be seen to have failed.
Anyway, go read the bastard's excellent essay. I will just sit here in my pool of failure.
pharyngula | November 10, 2008
One of the oldest canards in the creationists' book is the claim that evolution must be false because it violates the second law of thermodynamics, or the principle that, as they put it, everything must go from order to disorder. One of the more persistent perpetrators of this kind of sloppy thinking is Henry Morris, and few creationists today seem able to get beyond this error.
Remember this tendency from order to disorder applies to all real processes. Real processes include, of course, biological and geological processes, as well as chemical and physical processes. The interesting…
laelaps | November 10, 2008
The skulls of Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal compared, from Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man.
Our species is nothing if not vain. The natural world is saturated with wonders, yet the phenomena of most concern are those directly relating to us. Even in the long public argument over evolution, where the ancestry of whales and birds is often quarreled over, our own ancestry is the real reason for the contention. What makes evolution so threatening to some is that it applies to every organism and does not allow us to draw a line in the sand between us and the rest of life on this planet. We are…
razib | November 9, 2008E.O. Wilson shifts his position on altruism in nature:
It is a puzzle of evolution: If natural selection dictates that the fittest survive, why do we see altruism in nature? Why do worker bees or ants, for instance, refrain from competing with those around them, but instead search for food or build nests on behalf of their companions? Why do they sacrifice their own reproductive success for the good of the group?
In the 1960s, British biologist William Hamilton offered an explanation in a theory now called kin selection. When animals, often insects, help siblings or other relatives survive,…
grrlscientist | November 9, 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. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists…
evolvingthoughts | November 8, 2008
It has become common in recent years for people to use terms of philosophy in distinct contexts, as it has terms of biology. Thus, ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant. I have noticed this tendency of computer technology for decades, ever since I got hopelessly muddled when doing database programming in the early 80s until I realised that they were using some terminology of formal logic in exactly the wrong way (I forget what it was now). A database ontology is not an…
gregladen | November 7, 2008Well?
I wish I could give you the video right now. It is just before six o'clock central time, and the discussion on MSNBC just got interesting. Interesting enough that some of you are going to want to write letters to make sure the producers don't do the wrong thing...
Stay tuned!!!
Oh, the short answer: No, of course he does not.
UPDATE:
This all played out on David Gregory's new show, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which replaces the Road to the White House. Today's show was hosted by conservative newswoman Mika Brzezinski, and during the usual discussion with the panel of commentaries…
mikethemadbiologist | November 6, 2008Every time there's an article about species barcoding--using a short DNA sequence to identify species--there always seems to be people who get all het up:
Barcoding, which is something I have criticised and discussed before here, and here, treats species as things that have some invariant property (in this case, a segment of the COI gene) that maps directly onto the entities one-to-one. As Brent Mishler, head of the Berkeley herbarium, says
We're not accusing Hebert of being a creationist, just of acting like one.
Why? Because creationists treat species as having invariant properties.…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
I am keen to jot down whatever I can about the ontologies of biology - not just evolution, but also molecular, developmental, taxonomic, ecological and other domains of biology. I want to do this in a relatively systematic manner, so I would appreciate readers noting in the comments the sorts of things/classes/objects that they would like to see discussed, and the domains in which these objects are objects. General categorials rather than specific objects like "humans" or "angiosperms" and the like, please. When we have enough requests I'll sketch out the topics in a later post. Thanks
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent…
edyong | November 3, 2008Mammals like ourselves pass our genes 'vertically' from parent to child. But bacteria aren't quite so limited; they have mastered the art of gene-swapping and regularly transfer DNA 'horizontally' from one cell to another. This "horizontal gene transfer" has been largely viewed as a trademark of single-celled organisms, with few examples among animals and plants. That is, until now.
A group of American researchers have discovered a group of genetic sequences that have clearly jumped around the genomes of several mammals, one reptile and one amphibian. It's the most dramatic example yet that…
grrlscientist | November 2, 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 wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that 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 published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird…
pharyngula | November 2, 2008My latest Seed column slipped quietly onto the interwebs last week — it's an overview of how the glues that hold multicellular organisms together first evolved in single celled creatures, represented today by the choanoflagellates.
Just as a teaser, the next print edition that should be coming out soon will continue the focus on enlightening organisms of remarkable simplicity with a description of the results of the Trichoplax genome. Get it! You will also be rewarded with a great issue focusing on science policy.
pharyngula | November 2, 2008As anyone who has followed computer games at all lately knows, Spore is the recently released computer game from Maxis that was initially touted as a kind of partial simulation of evolution. Unfortunately, It wasn't a very good simulation of much of anything, and as a game it has only been a partial success, with some parts being quite entertaining and others deserving a resounding "meh". (Disclaimer: I have the game, but haven't bothered to install it yet; I've let Skatje play it for me, and I've read the reviews, and suffered a noticeable loss of enthusiasm from that exposure.)
Now there…
laelaps | November 1, 2008It's a little dated, but here's an episode of the old TLC show PaleoWorld about hominid posture and bipedalism;
razib | October 30, 2008Evolution of trust and trustworthiness: social awareness favours personality differences (Open Access):
Interest in the evolution and maintenance of personality is burgeoning. Individuals of diverse animal species differ in their aggressiveness, fearfulness, sociability and activity. Strong trade-offs, mutation-selection balance, spatio-temporal fluctuations in selection, frequency dependence and good-genes mate choice are invoked to explain heritable personality variation, yet for continuous behavioural traits, it remains unclear which selective force is likely to maintain distinct…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2008tags: blue tit, Cyanistes caeruleus, extrapair fertilization, genetic benefit hypothesis, genetic similarity, plumage color, birdsong, ornithology, behavioral ecology
Blue tit, Cyanistes caeruleus.
Image: Paul Hillion, 26 April 2008.
Even though most bird species form social bonds with their mates, they are not always faithful partners to each other. It's easy to figure out why male birds engage in extrapair copulations: this increases the total number of their offspring -- and this increases their reproductive fitness. But since female birds are physically capable of producing only…
laelaps | October 28, 2008
As explained in Narratives of Human Evolution (and outlined in an early chapter of Bones of Contention), scientific descriptions of human evolution have often been shaped by a belief in progress and our* superiority. Even today, when descriptions are often more objective on the surface, there are subtexts in which fossils are arranged this way or that to reflect certain values and expectations.
*[Whose superiority, however, differs depending on who is speaking. This could range from our species, Homo sapiens, to just one "race" of humans (I bet you can guess which).]
Today it requires a bit…
evolvingthoughts | October 27, 2008
The NCSE has put up more of its content from it's excellent, if badly laid out, magazine Reports of the NCSE. As a result, one of my better pieces, on species concepts, is now up, with a list of what I at the time thought were the concepts in the modern literature, derived from Mayden's 1997 piece. I would revise the phylogenetic concepts somewhat, but the citations are still useful. Also go check out the revised NCSE website. It has lots of useful links about antievolutionism and evolution. And happy birthday to Genie...
evolvingthoughts | October 26, 2008
The Ediacaran period is the era between around 635Mybp and 540Mybp, just before the Cambrian. You pronounce it "ed-ee-ack-a-ran". It is also the name of a new blog by the inimitable Chris Nedin, erstwhile paleontologist who specialised in the Ediacaran fauna before joining the Dark Side (federal public service) in order to eat. Go read Ediacaran: Past Imperfect and leave some comments. His first post is about why Anomalocaris couldn't continue to eat trilobites. I guarantee that he will be interesting and informed. Bugger knows way too much anyway...