evolution
laelaps | September 12, 2008One of the most difficult things about writing about fossil whales is that so few of them have been figured in books and papers. There are a few skeletal reconstructions that are reproduced over and over and over again, but in my research some genera are only mentioned by name. Georgiacetus is one such example.
Georgiacetus is one of those neat archaeocetes that exemplifies the transition from land to water among the earliest whales. It was not fully aquatically adapted like Basilosaurus and Dorudon, but at the same time it was proportioned very differently from earlier creatures like…
gregladen | September 12, 2008Life Science Teachers: Take special note!
This is not yet an error in the mainstream press, but there is an error afoot, currently represented in the widely read slashdot, which I imagine will propagate. The purpose of this post is to alert you to this problem and prepare you for the occasion when you run into a wackaloon creationist waving their arms around and screaming "Carbon dating does not work! It's been proven." This story also has a Global Warming Denialism component.
What I'm going to do here is give you the basic facts, then the misinterpreted text.
We start with the basic…
awild | September 12, 2008
Prionocyphon Marsh Beetle (Scirtidae)
New York
Scirtidae is a small family of mostly small beetles found in wet, swampy habitats all over the world. Taxonomists find them to be difficult creatures, the larvae are archaic in appearance but the adults share some similarities with the elateriforms- click beetles, fireflies, and the like. Recent research based on ribosomal DNA sequences showed why their evolutionary relationships have been so hard to peg. Rather than fitting neatly inside one of the 4 beetle suborders, these insects are surprisingly old, diverging from the lineage that led…
evolvingthoughts | September 11, 2008
I'm supposed to be marking essays, but the reaction to Thony's recent guest articles has triggered in me a conditioned reflex: the uses and abuses of history by scientists.
Historians have a certain way to pursue their profession - it involves massive use of documentary evidence, a care taken to avoid naming heroes and villains, and in general a strong devotion to the minutae and detail of history, instead of the now-old-fashioned grand sweeps of a Toynbee or Marx. Sure, they disagree how to interpret things, including mindsets of agents in another time, but overall when a historian gives…
edyong | September 11, 2008Some 230 million years ago, giant reptiles walked the Earth. Some were large and fearsome predators; others were nimble and fleet-footed runners; and yet others were heavily armoured with bony plates running down their backs. Their bodies had evolved into an extraordinary range of shapes and sizes and they had done so at a breakneck pace. They were truly some of the most impressive animals of their time. They were the crurotarsans.
Wait... the who and what now? Chances are you've never heard of the crurotarsans and you were expecting that other, more famous group of giant reptiles - the…
clock | September 11, 2008From SCONC:
Wednesday, Sept. 24
Noon, with free lunch
Sigma Xi pizza lunch with Anne Yoder, director of the Duke University Lemur Center: "Historical biogeography of Madagascar: using genes to study the evolution of an island."
3106 E. Hwy 54, RTP
laelaps | September 10, 2008For over 120 years, the origin of whales vexed paleontologists. They were among the strangest of all mammals, creatures completely adapted to the sea with more in common with us than any fish (although at the beginning of the 19th century "common sense" said otherwise), and it was difficult to imagine how they evolved. If Charles Darwin was right and all life had evolved, different evolutionary paths diverging through time, then whales must have had some sort of traceable ancestry.
The discovery of fossil whales like Basilosaurus and Squalodon illustrated that the evolution of whales may have…
laelaps | September 9, 2008A few years ago I got the chance to see the Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries exhibit at the AMNH before it hit the road. I wish I could see it again now that I know a little bit more, but if you're in the Denver area you're in luck; the exhibition is opening there later this month. Here are some nifty advertisements for it at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science;
laelaps | September 9, 2008"... for in all the boundless realm of philosophy and science no thought has brought with it so much pain, or in the end has led to such a full measure of the joy which comes of intellectual effort and activity as that doctrine of Organic Evolution which will ever be associated, first and foremost, with the name of Charles Robert Darwin." - Edward Poulton, "Fifty Years of Darwinism" (1908)
Edward Poulton and T.C. Chamberlin may have been impressed by evolution by natural selection during the centenary celebration of Charles Darwin's (portrait on the lower right) birth in 1908, but…
pharyngula | September 9, 2008Last weekend's bloggingheads was an interesting discussion between John Horgan and Brian Ferguson on the unfortunate misconception many people have about human evolution — the simplistic idea that evolution is always about selection for individuals who are better at killing their competitors. It doesn't work that way! Ferguson discusses the interesting and obvious idea that the data does not back up the notion that being a great warrior is generally a good strategy, because being a great warrior also greatly increases the likelihood that you'll end up dead.
Evolution is about whatever works,…
razib | September 8, 2008The most recent issue of Seed Magazine has a cover story that readers of this weblog might find of interest, How We Evolve. It's not online, but its basic core is the acceleration of recent human evolution. John Hawks seems to be the primary source. The author, Benjamin Phelan, made a good faith effort to explain concepts like linkage disequilibrium, the Shifting Balance (by implication) and haplotype structure. I have some qualms about the piece, which I will moot at some point in the near future, but I think if you find some of the population genetics references on this blog opaque…
evolvingthoughts | September 8, 2008
I am presently reading Fuller's Dissent over Descent, but here's A. C. Grayling's review in advance of mine. The money quote:
The demerits of ID theory itself – so woeful as to be funny: in this world of ours, with so much failed experiment of life, so much repetition and haphazard variety of endeavour to meet the challenge of passing on genes, to claim the existence and activity of a supernatural designer would be a sort of blasphemy on the latter, if it existed – are well enough known not to require the wasted effort of iteration; nor does the overwhelming security of evolutionary theory…
awild | September 8, 2008Here's an example of the power of evolutionary theory. Suefuji et al just published a paper in Biology Letters describing the relationship between the number of queens in an ant nest and the rearing of new reproductives. That'd be a cool enough paper on its own, but there's more. Evolutionary theory makes some specific predictions about when sexuals ought to be produced under different numbers of queens. If the selfish-gene hypotheses of evolution are true, then nests with multiple queens should race to produce sexual brood earlier than nests with single queens. And that is exactly…
grrlscientist | September 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 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 bird pals, 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 books that are (or will…
clock | September 6, 2008Jonathan describes, step by step.
I wonder if there are any palindromic sequences to be found?
clock | September 5, 2008...clone of Professor Steve Steve? Ehrm, the 900th Steve on the listing of the Project Steve?
laelaps | September 5, 2008According to the highly reputable and fact-oriented periodical The Onion, a stain resembling Charles Darwin has appeared on the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. You may recall that Dayton was the site of the famous 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" (no, it did not involve the evolution of mint-flavored primates), although I would say that St. Darwin has appeared to us over 75 years too late. Nevertheless, even the prophet Tim White has apparently visited the site;
Thousands of pilgrims from as far away as Berkeley's paleoanthropology department have flocked to the site to lay wreaths of…
scientificactivist | September 5, 2008Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life
by Carl Zimmer
Pantheon: 2008, 256 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
I come face-to-face with Escherichia coli every day. In a sense, we all do--as billions of E. coli inhabit every individual's intestines. But for me, E. coli is a protein factory. I'm a structural biologist, and my work depends on being able to produce large amounts of specific proteins--generally proteins found in humans or mice. However, purifying large amounts of these proteins from humans or mice would be virtually impossible, and manipulating these proteins in the manner I…
clock | September 5, 2008Message from Sigma Xi:
You may know that Duke University is home to the Duke Lemur Center (http://lemur.duke.edu/), the world's largest sanctuary for rare and endangered prosimian primates. But do you know its research? For a glimpse, attend Sigma Xi's first 2007-2008 pizza lunch at noon, Wednesday, Sept 24. Center director Anne Yoder will speak on the "Historical bio-geography of Madagascar: Using genes to study the evolution of an island" as well as field your questions.
Pizza lunch is free. RSVPs required to cclabby AT amsci DOT org. Directions to Sigma XI: http://www.sigmaxi.org/about/…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2008
One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something (present, potent or scient). Darwin and his friend Asa Gray debated this issue in correspondence, and it ended up as the final pages of his 1868 Variation (below the fold). Effectively, Darwin argued that we cannot "reasonably maintain" that God intended for chance events that are useful to humans or to the species concerned. It is this that I want to discuss,…