evolution
evolgen | July 28, 2008
The University of Iowa is hosting next year's meeting of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, SMBE 2009. I usually go to the annual SMBE conference, and I was probably going to attend SMBE 2009. Now I'm definitely going. Why? Because John Logsdon just announced that they'll be hosting a pre-conference meeting on the Evolution of Sex and Recombination.
The Sex & Recombination meeting was supposed to happen this summer, and it was scheduled for the week prior to the Evolution 2008 conference in Minnesota. But mother nature interrupted, and the flooded campus was in no state to…
laelaps | July 28, 2008
A silverback Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed on July 23, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
During my elementary school years I was spoon-fed the classic, textbook mythology about evolutionary theory. Although Jean Baptiste Lamarck had come up with a ridiculous notion to explain the neck of the giraffe the world was wholly unprepared for Charles Darwin's crystal clear scientific revelation in 1859, On the Origin of Species instantaneously being accepted as the only reasonable explanation for the unity and diversity of life. This is absolute nonsense, of course, but as we approach the "…
grrlscientist | July 27, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Huxley, Robert (editor). The Great Naturalists. 2007. Thames and Hudson. Hardbound: 304 pages. Price: $39.95 U.S. [Amazon: $26.37]. SUMMARY: Covers the naturalists from Classical times to the end of the 19th…
evolvingthoughts | July 26, 2008
A new genus name for water mites, from a recent paper in Zootaxa:
Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word ‘vagabundo’ that means ‘wanderer’. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time ago (Valdecasas et al. 2000) that the popularity of the Science Citation Index (SCI) as a measure of ‘good’ science has been damaging to basic taxonomic work. Despite statements to the contrary that SCI is not adequate to evaluate taxonomic production (Krell 2000), it is used routinely to evaluate taxonomists and prioritize research grant proposals. As with…
jlynch | July 26, 2008(This review appeared in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 2005)
As human beings, we like to tell stories--we are story-telling apes. As scientists, however, we tend not to see ourselves as telling stories for, we are led to believe, stories are mere fiction. Yet when faced with answering the question of why or how we became story-telling apes, we are often presented with a series of hypotheses with little empirical evidence to distinguish between them. In many ways, Wiktor Stoczkowski claims that it is because we are storytelling apes, and that because stories often represent…
jlynch | July 26, 2008(A review from Journal of the History of Biology 2004)
In the years following the publication of Origin of Species, George Romanes developed his theory of physiological selection in which he posited that "physiological peculiarities" lead to hybrid sterility between individuals and thus isolation which would allow natural selection to "promote diversity of character, and thus to evolve species in ramifying branches instead of linear series" (Romanes, 1886, qtd. p. 46). He felt that these physiological peculiarities may involve the reproductive system and in a series of works that received a…
evolvingthoughts | July 25, 2008
Strange cladogram from another method, able to leap large evolutionary distances in a single bound, faster than a speeding parsimony analysis... oh, you get the idea.
A supertree is what you get when you add a number of possibly divergent partial phylogenies (evolutionary histories with a root) together to forma single tree. I envisage them as a kind of overlay of various trees, giving you a furry "consensus" and extending phylogenies to form larger phylogenies. How good they are, I can't say.
Anyway, a supertree analysis of most known dinosaurs shows that they did not undergo a sudden…
laelaps | July 25, 2008Beyond the importance of his ideas I find the life of Charles Darwin fascinating because of all the innumerable opportunities for history to have turned out differently. If his father had kept Darwin off the HMS Beagle, for instance, Darwin may well have had the quiet country parsonage he longed for, finding a non-controversial refuge in changing times. History, of course, turned out quite differently, but the more I learn about Darwin's life the more I appreciate the struggle involved in the development of evolution by natural selection.
Although Darwin unintentionally imitated some of his…
mikethemadbiologist | July 25, 2008I've written before about antibiotic resistance in the developing world. Because these poor communities don't have access to many antibiotics, one wouldn't expect high frequencies of resistance to antibiotics. Resistance to ciprofloxacin ('Cipro') is all the more shocking because these communities don't have access to this relatively expensive drug*. Not only is ciprofloxacin resistance observed, but, in these communities, it occurs at higher frequencies than in intensive care units in developed countries.
So what's a possible culprit?
Sadly, a recent paper in PLoS ONE suggests that…
grrlscientist | July 24, 2008tags: dinosaurs, Tarbosaurus bataar, paleontology, fossils, Tyrannosaurs rex
The newly unveiled fossil skeleton of the juvenile Tarbosaurus bataar in its protective jacket.
Discovered in 2006, a near-perfect complete skeleton of a juvenile Tarbosaurus find was made available for public viewing for the first time today by the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Science in Okayama, western Japan. This fossil was originally unearthed from a chunk of sandstone in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia by a team of Mongolian and Japanese researchers. The fossil of the young dinosaur is roughly 70 million years…
mikethemadbiologist | July 24, 2008One of the topics I discuss on this blog is the idiocy surrounding Social Security--despite all of the hype, Social Security is not DOOMED!! (To make a longish explanation short, every year for the last fourteen years, Social Security has been predicted to become insolvent in 32 to 36 years. 'Insolvency' will only occur if the economy underperforms on an unprecented scale--including the decade surrounding the Great Depression--for several decades. In that case, a very modest increase in the payroll tax will cover all necessary payouts. There is, however, a general budget crisis that the…
razib | July 23, 2008Sandman has a post up, Can There Be A Synthesis Between Cultural And Biological Evolution?, taking off on the PLoS Biology article, Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution. Read both. I would add one important point though: linguistic and biological evolution are simply subsets of evolutionary dynamics. That is why Martin Nowak's book of that name, Evolutionary Dynamics, naturally has a section on the evolution of language. Several evolutionarily oriented thinkers have attempted to translate models originally developed for biology into the domain of culture. Cultural…
jrosenhouse | July 23, 2008There's an interesting discussion going on between Larry Moran and Richard Dawkins. The subject is the title of Dawkins' 1996 book Climbing Mt. Improbable. It started with this post over at Larry's blog. He included Dawkins in his list of good science writers who were nonetheless excluded from Dawkins' recent anthology of science writing. Along the way, Moran offered this thought:
Dawkins is also a master of metaphor but, sometimes the metaphors are misleading and can give an incorrect view of evolution (e.g. Climbing Mt. Improbable).
Personally, I loved the metaphor of Mt. Improbable…
clock | July 23, 2008Olivia Judson has, so far, posted four parts of her Darwin series. We ("we" meaning "bloggers' including myself) have already commented on some of these, but here is the entire series (so far, I hope there will be more) for ease of use:
Darwinmania!
An Original Confession
Let's Get Rid of Darwinism
A Natural Selection
pharyngula | July 23, 2008Olivia Judson has a lovely article about ongoing examples of evolution.
Before the creationists start whining, I know — they're still birds and lizards and flies. Get over it. They've changed, as evolution predicts.
jlynch | July 23, 2008(Another review that was published a few years back, in this case in Isis in 2001. Alter's book is still in print and still worth reading.)
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was written in a vivid style and, as such, is frequently studied as much as literature as scientific text. Particularly notable is Darwin's use of analogy and metaphor. In the work under review, Stephen G. Alter focuses on two of Darwin's literary devices - the metaphor of the tree and the analogy between languages and species - and in so doing demonstrates how both the supporters and opponents of transmutation used…
pharyngula | July 23, 2008
Life has two contradictory properties that any theory explaining its origin must encompass: similarities everywhere, and differences separating species. So far, the only theory that covers both beautifully and explains how one is the consequence of the other is evolution. Common descent unites all life on earth, while evolution itself is about constant change; similarities are rooted in our shared ancestry, while differences arise as lineages diverge.
Now here's a new example of both phenomena: the development of segmentation in snakes. We humans have 33 vertebrae, zebrafish have 30-33,…
evolvingthoughts | July 22, 2008
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought that apes (simia, literally "the similar ones"), which in that time include monkeys and what we now call apes indifferently, were distinct from humans in every meaningful way. As Cicero said after citing Ennius, the character is different.
But then along came a Swedish botanist turned generalist, Carolus Linnaeus, in the 18th century, and despite being a creationist, he put apes,…
evolvingthoughts | July 22, 2008
A Floridan neighborhood was surprised yesterday when after heavy rain, catfish started walking around their street. Of course, the fish were quick to point out that this doesn't prove evolution is possible, as they all went to the local Baptist church...
sa smith | July 22, 2008
This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that!
I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;)
Gimme a sec. Youll see why Im reposting this. *melts with embarrassment*
Me: "OMG! My boyfriend published another paper!!"
Bossman: "Ugh. Do you have any idea how old he is?"
Me: "Our love, it is forbidden."
My virus boyfriend Patrick Forterre is still fighting the good…