evolution
grrlscientist | October 26, 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…
gregladen | October 24, 2008There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years.
By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the genome. By recent times, the authors mean various things, depending on which part of the analysis you examine, and depending on what is meant by "increased." ... In other words, the timing of an event that is not really an event (but rather a change in rate of something) is hard…
edyong | October 24, 2008
Evolution mostly involves small, gradual changes, and for good reason - we might expect that large changes to an animal's genetic code, and therefore to its body plan, simply wouldn't work. It would be like shoving an extra cog into a finely-tuned machine and expecting it to fit in - the more likely outcome is a malfunctioning mess.
But that's not always the case, at least not for the evolution of the human eye. New research shows that the eye and its connections to the brain are surprisingly flexible, and can incorporate major evolutionary changes with ease.
In our retinas, cone cells…
razib | October 23, 2008David's penultimate post on Sewall Wright, Notes on Sewall Wright: The Shifting Balance Theory - Part 1:
Two catch-phrases indissolubly linked with Sewall Wright are the adaptive landscape, and the shifting balance. In preparing my note on Wright's concept of the adaptive landscape I was surprised to discover that Wright himself seldom if ever used this expression. I could not find a single example. I was therefore half-expecting that I would not find any reference to the shifting balance either - and I would have been half-right. Wright did use that term, but not, as far as I can find, until…
sporte | October 23, 2008Two interesting events are happening, Monday night, Oct. 27th.
At the UW: Josh Rosenau from the National Center for Science Education will be speaking at 6 pm about Creationist attacks on science education. (Josh is also a Science Blogger).
In Ravenna, at Third Place Pub: Ted White from the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute will be talking at 7 pm about infectious disease.
If you're interested hearing Josh, contact Kristy Brady, kbrady at u.washington.edu.
If you're interested in infectious disease, just show up at the pub.
It would be hard to choose which event to attend, but I won'…
awild | October 22, 2008
Adetomyrma sp. "mad-01", larvae and adults
Madagascar
With a name like "dracula ant" you'd think these waspy little Adetomyrma might suddenly lunge for your jugular. But they are shy creatures, drinking not the blood of hapless victims but sparingly from the hemolymph of their own larvae. It's an odd behavior, yet one that makes a certain amount of sense when considering the haphazard way that evolution works.
Here's the problem: ants have a skinny little waist through which their digestive tract must pass. Solid food would lodge in the bottleneck and kill the ant, so the ants can't eat…
evolvingthoughts | October 22, 2008
That is not a riddle, or rather it's not meant to be, but it's a question worth asking about the barcoding project.
Wired has a nicely written piece about the rationale and program of giving species DNA barcodes and using the gene chosen as the barcode to identify the number of species out there in the world [Hat tip Agricultural Biodiversity]. In it, the founder of barcoding, Paul Hebert, recalls how he came up with the idea:
He says he came up with the idea for the machine in a grocery store. Walking down an aisle of packaged goods in 1998, he indulged in a moment of awe: Here, in a…
awild | October 21, 2008
Argentine ants tending scale insects
Three years after finishing my Ph.D., I have finally published the last bit of work from my dissertation. It's a multi-locus molecular phylogeny of the ant genus Linepithema, a group of mostly obscure Neotropical ants that would be overlooked if they didn't happen to contain the infamous Argentine Ant. In less jargony language, what I've done is reconstruct the evolution of an ant genus using genetic data. Here's the citation:
Wild, A. L. 2008. Evolution of the Neotropical Ant Genus Linepithema. Systematic Entomology, online early, doi: 10.1111/j.…
jrosenhouse | October 21, 2008Over at BeliefNet, Ken Ham and Karl Giberson are mixing it up on the subject of evolution and creationism. One post each so far.
Giberson got the ball rolling. After presenting a bit of his biography (grew up fundamentalist, lost confidence in YEC after studying college-level science) he gets down to business.
Creationists have to “explain away” a gigantic mountain range of evidence that the scientific community has accumulated in the past century. Neither the scientific community nor the scientific data is is on their side. They have to believe that God created a profoundly deceptive…
grrlscientist | October 19, 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…
edyong | October 18, 2008
A virus, like any other carrier of genetic information, can only enjoy evolutionary success by ensuring that its genetic material is passed on through the ages, and it can only do that if its offspring finds new hosts to infect. Its host must live to infect again, and the virus that kills its host prematurely signs its own evolutionary death sentence.
So over time, we might expect that the ideal virus would evolve to never kill any of its hosts - it would have zero 'virulence'. It would also evolve to successfully infect every host it comes into contact with it - it would have a…
oracknows | October 18, 2008Orac gets e-mail.
Most of it's just brief notes with a link that someone thinks I should check out (and possibly blog about). Even though I occasionally make sarcastic remarks about being deluged with one story or other from time to time, I actually do appreciate those. Many have been the times when I didn't really have anything that floated my boat enough to blog about that a juicy tidbit sent by a reader prevented the blog from going dark for a day. Whether that's always a good thing, I leave to the reader to judge.
Occasionally, I get mail profusely praising the blog. Affectation of an…
pharyngula | October 17, 2008
While Steve Jones might think human evolution has stopped, I have to say that that is impossible. If human technology removes a selective constraint, that doesn't stop evolution — it just opens up a new degree of freedom and allows change to carry us in a novel direction.
One interesting potential example is the availability of relatively safe Cesarean sections. Babies have very big heads that squeeze with only great difficulty through a relatively narrow pelvis, so the relationship in size between head diameter and the diameter of the pelvic opening has been a limitation on human evolution…
sporte | October 17, 2008The Galápagos islands rank high on my list of places that I really, really, really want to visit. But for many reasons, it's always looked like a trip to the Galápagos would be at least a decade or two away.
Now, I'll be able to go in January and so will all of you.
Thanks to the University of Cincinnati, we'll be able to follow in Darwin's historic steps, and experience some of his amazing journey.
The only difference is we'll do this trip as avatars in Second Life.
The University is stocking this intriguing exhibit with photos and images from the Galápagos, as part of a 150 year…
grrlscientist | October 17, 2008tags: Tiktaalik rosea, sarcopterygian, fishibian, fishapods, transitional fossil, evolution, vertebrate terrestriality, vertebrate evolution
A new study on the internal anatomy of the skull of the extraordinary fish, Tiktaalik roseae, which lived 375 million years ago, provides more evidence of how vertebrate life transitioned from water to land. The head showed changes from more primitive fish that helped adapt to the new feeding and breathing conditions presented by a terrestrial environment, scientists said.
Image: Ted Daeschler, Academy of Natural Sciences [larger view].
A paper was…
laelaps | October 17, 2008Last week I wrote about an obscure little book called Phreno-Geology by J. Stanley Grimes which, surprisingly, proposed a mechanism of evolution that combined Lamarckism with natural selection. Since I wrote it, I have been informed that this particular work is significant to the history of science, so I tried to do a little more digging to try and find reviews or reactions to the book.
As I speculated in my previous post, the good theoretical concepts Grimes came up with may have been marred with his associated with phrenology, mesmerism, and other "fads," as well as the fact that a number…
pharyngula | October 16, 2008
We all know the story of the Miller-Urey experiment. In 1953, a young graduate student named Stanley Miller ran an off-the-wall experiment: he ran water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a sealed flask with a pair of electrodes to produce a spark, and from those simple building blocks discovered that more complex compounds, such as amino acids, were spontaneously produced. Stanley Miller died in 2007, and in going through his effects, the original apparatus was discovered, and in addition, several small sealed vials containing the sludge produced in the original experiment were also found.…
laelaps | October 15, 2008When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, he largely avoided the issue of human evolution. The implication that our species had evolved was there, and many were concerned with our connection to "lower" animals, but Darwin did not provide his opponents any extra ammunition in this area. In 1871, however, Darwin's two-volume The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was printed, and this was a somewhat belated contribution to debates already stirred by T.H. Huxley's 1863 pamphlet Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature and Charles…
gregladen | October 14, 2008Consider the following words:
The evidence supporting evolution is overwhelming and comes from diverse disciplines, such as molecular biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, ethology, and biochemistry. There is no controversy among biologists about whether evolution occurs, nor are there science-based alternative theories. Evolution is a unifying theme in biology; teaching it as such is the best way to show students what biology is about and how they can use evolution as a tool to understand our world. [Evolution] is as important an idea as there is in science - it is a great gift to…