evolution
evolvingthoughts | September 4, 2008
Once again I have manflu, the most despicable disease known to man (and to women, who also suffer indirectly from it).
So blogging is patchy. Also, I have to do some teaching stuff, which involves thinking about what the essays say.
I am writing, slowly, a piece about the recent paper on ratite origins first author of which is my friend and occasional sparring partner John Harshman. As this means I have to learn stuff first, it's taking a while, but I want it to be a good one. Be patient, and in the meantime read this.
jrosenhouse | September 4, 2008I've already received quite a few submissions for the big Carnival of Evolution. Alas, I have also received a few submissions which, while good, were outside the parameters of what I had in mind. So let me offer two clarifications:
I'm looking specifically for writing first posted on blogs. One of the main purposes of the Carnival is to provide publicity for good writing at undeservedly obscure blogs.
I'm looking for recent writing, say, within the last two months.
Sorry if these points weren't clear with the initial announcement. I appreciate all the submissions. Keep 'em coming!
edyong | September 4, 2008The image on the right is both beautiful and exciting. Let me explain why. It's the paw of an embryonic mouse and a team of geneticists have inserted a fragment of human DNA into its cells. The fragment contains an "enhancer" element, a short span of DNA that switches other genes on and off; in this case, they put the enhancer in control of a gene whose activity creates a blue chemical.
This particular enhancer is called HACNS1. Throughout the course of animal evolution, its sequence has gone relatively unchanged in almost all back-boned animals, but it has evolved rapidly in the human…
mikethemadbiologist | September 4, 2008A recent paper examined if use of the antibiotic cotrimoxazole was correlated with resistance in three different bacterial pathogens, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, and Moraxella catarrhalis. To quickly summarize, in one species, S. pneumoniae, resistance was correlated with use, whereas it was not for the other two species. While the study is fine for what it is, it inadvertently highlights a problem most surveillance systems have:
they don't incorporate genetic information.
Without genotypic information, we don't really know what happened. Is the correlation spurious,…
jrosenhouse | September 2, 2008Good news! Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Daniel Brown, there is now a Carnival of Evolution. Better news! I will be hosting the next installment. So send your best evolution related writing to me at rosenhjd@jmu.edu. I'm looking for good, original writing on anything related to evolution, so make sure you proofread your stuff before sending it to me. It's always nice to give a little link love to undeservedly obscure bloggers, so here's your chance to get some publicity. The deadline will be September 14.
gregladen | September 1, 2008Natalie has sent me a link to a great photo. I'd love to put it up on the blog, but rights are reserved and I spent my allocated two minutes looking for a way to get permission and failed. So I'll just give you the link. Worth a look.
grrlscientist | September 1, 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…
evolvingthoughts | August 31, 2008The Annotated Budak has an absolutely wonderful post on megafauna, hominid impacts, biodiversity and biogeography up. Go read it immediately.
evolvingthoughts | August 30, 2008
One of the major events in the history of science was the foundation of a number of published communications, so that the results of observation and research could be relatively quickly shared amongst scholars, and one of the first of these was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which institution was founded in part by my illustrious namesake, Bp John Wilkins.
Although the actual publications are online only in JStor, to which a subscription is required, the Philosophical Transactions were republished by the Royal Society in the early 1800s, and they are online…
mikethemadbiologist | August 29, 2008There have been a lot of comments on this post about using molecular evolution to teach evolutionary biology. A couple of people were worried that creationists will look at molecular data and claim that it is 'microevolution' and thus compatible with creationism (I've dealt with the creationists' macroevolution canard before). I'm not worried about this issue.
First, even when a study (or project) is focused on a single species, if you're building trees, then you typically need an outgroup (sequence from another species). And now, once again, we're in the world of common descent....and…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2008
Kangaroo Island is a largish island off the coast of South Australia, famous for its wildlife and food. It also has some of the best preserved Ediacaran Cambrian fossils, on a par with the famous Burgess Shale. A report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's TV show Catalyst recently showcased these, and interviewed my friend Chris Nedin as well as his colleagues Jim Gehling and Diego Garcia. Chris is the guy shown on the preview of the video. You can view the report on video, or read the transcript, courtesy of the ABC.
Here's a pic of Nedin showing us where the Ediacaran period…
laelaps | August 28, 2008If there is any author associated with the book title On the Origin of Species it is most certainly Charles Darwin, yet Darwin was not the only person to pen a book beginning with those words. The full title of Darwin's first edition was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, but about two decades later another On the Origin of Species would be published bearing Thomas Henry Huxley's name. With the full title On the Origin of Species: Or, the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature, the book was a compilation…
laelaps | August 27, 2008
The famous fold-out plate that accompanied Pre-Adamite Man. Not the "dividing line" between ancient life and modern humans formed by the glaciers.
There is more to understanding the history of science than memorizing the dates when seminal books were published or knowing the names of the founders of particular disciplines. Science must be understood in context, and given the present public arguments about evolution it can be profitable to look back and see how science was being popularized circa 1859. While there were some books by scientists that were accessible to the public, many non-…
mikethemadbiologist | August 26, 2008In the midst of the kerfuffle about atheism, religion, and teaching evolution in high school, the NY Times article made me wonder if focusing part of the curriculum on molecular evolution would be a better way of teaching evolutionary biology* (and ScienceBlogling Sandra describes some good ways of doing so).
I pose this as a question--it could be a dreadful idea, but here are some things to consider:
Molecular biology is viewed as more 'scientific.' Like it or not (and I don't), molecular biology is viewed as more rigorous than organismal biology.
DNA sequence is pretty easy to understand…
razib | August 25, 2008Update: Please read Sandman's response after you look over this post....
New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth:
Blades were first produced by Homo sapiens during their colonization of Europe from Africa approximately 40,000 years ago. This has traditionally been thought to be a dramatic technological advance, helping Homo sapiens out-compete, and eventually eradicate, their Stone Age cousins. Yet when the research team analysed their data there was no statistical difference between the efficiency of the two technologies. In fact, their findings showed that in some respects the flakes…
evolvingthoughts | August 25, 2008
Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question.
Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion.
A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a technical problem with DNA Barcoding. Apparently the assays pick up pseudogenes that are similar enough to the COXII mt genes to register but which have evolved by drift and random mutation so they give a false positive for a "novel" species.
PLoS Biology has a lovely memoir of Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA…
laelaps | August 25, 2008In a week I'll be headed back into the dusty, faded-pastel halls of higher learning for the fall semester, and given that I expect many of you will be doing the same I thought I would open up a thread about evolution education. As I have said multiple times, just because creationism isn't being taught doesn't mean that students are receiving a firm grounding in evolutionary biology. In my own experience, during high school evolution was a quick sub-unit that was paired with population genetics toward the end of the spring. Even in college courses I attended, evolution was relegated to the…
gregladen | August 25, 2008David Campbell is a life science teacher in Florida who was recently profiled in the New York Times because of his involvement in the debate between Creationism and Evolution. This discussion is being picked up in the Blogosphere, and this is very timely, as this is the time when teachers in most US school districts are just heading back to class.
My "back to school" contribution is a repost of one of my more popular bits on the problem of the bible thumping student. This is revised and reposted from my old site. Enjoy:
.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own…
evolvingthoughts | August 24, 2008
In addition to Fuller's Science versus Religion, I also received my copy of Phil Dowe's Galileo, Darwin and Hawking last week, and today arrives Roy Davies' The Darwin Conspiracy (thanks, Roy; I will be as even handed as I can be), and Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God. So I am going to be busy over the next few weeks. I'll post a bloggy review here for those that I also have to review for a journal (I have a backlog on this - Bowler's Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons is also due).
I'm about one third through Schaeffer's book already - it's a good read. His father and mother come across as…
grrlscientist | August 24, 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…