evolution
gregladen | July 14, 2008 Darwin and Wallace, chillin' Let's talk about Darwin and Wallace's joint presentation on Natural Selection in 1858.
It is not usually the case that I write a blog post for a carnival. I usually just write for the blog, then now and then sit down and figure out which posts should go to with carnivals. That is not the case with this post.
Some time ago I thought, while writing a Peer Reviewed Research post, that it would be interesting to write up older papers, classics, or more recent papers that were of great interest for one reason or another but maybe a few years old. Just around…
edyong | July 14, 2008Evolution dances to the tune of death. Killers - be they predators, diseases or competitive peers - can radically shape a species' life cycles by striking down individuals of a certain age. The survivors respond by changing their "life histories" - a collection of traits that defines their reproductive cycles, including how often they breed, when they start to do so and how many young they have.
If an animal's adult life is short and brutal, they tend to grow quickly and become sexually mature at a young age - a strategy that maximises their chances of siring the next generation. The…
mikethemadbiologist | July 14, 2008...seven years later? The bad news--for years, cephalosporin antibiotics (antibiotics derived from penicillin, such as ceftiofur, cephalothalin, cefoxitin, and ceftriaxone) were used 'off-label' (meaning irresponsibly) in agriculture (italics mine):
Inspectors found a common antibiotic has been misused in animals through practices such as injections into chicken eggs and ordered farmers to stop the unapproved treatments because of the risk to humans.
The drugs, called cephalosporins, were given in unapproved doses to chickens, beef, pigs and dairy cows, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration…
clock | July 12, 2008Nick Matzke wrote an excellent update on what we know about the Origin of Life:
Here is a short list of things we have discovered or confirmed in the last 50 years or so pertaining to the origin of life. In my opinion all of these points have reached high enough confidence that they are unlikely to change much with future discoveries, and our confidence in them does not depend in uncertainties in the remaining unanswered questions.
I agree with him that, in confrontations with Creationists, we should not secede the origin of life to then (i.e.., "evolution only covers what happens once Life…
clock | July 12, 2008Abbie and PZ chat about the recent discoveries in biology, how exciting those discoveries are, and how annoying it is when Creationists try to put a damper on such excitement:
evolvingthoughts | July 11, 2008
When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society?
These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing of a communion wafer from a Catholic church. As a result, he got death threats, attempts to have him fired from his university position, and general abuse while the correspondents were simultaneously affirming the niceness of Catholics [see here, here and here for example]. Meanwhile, the Catholic Cardinal of Sydney, George Pell, appears not to have learned…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, birdsong, personality traits, mate choice, sexual selection, risk taking, European collared flycatcher, Ficedula albicollis, László Zsolt Garamszegi
Male European collared flycatcher, Ficedula albicollis, singing.
Image: Beijershamn Ãland, 23 May 2004 [link].
Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel 1/1000s f/8.0 at 400.0mm iso400.
Most people don't believe that animals possess distinct personalities, although they readily recognize and can describe individual personalities among their family, friends and neighbors and are aware of the importance of individual…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, reciprocal altruism, cooperation, anti-predator behavior, mobbing, birds, pied flycatcher, Ficedula hypoleuca, Indrikis Krams
Male European pied flycatcher, Ficedula hypoleuca, singing.
Skåne, Sweden.
Image: Omar Brännström, 8 May 2005 [link].
Canon EOS 1D Mark II ,Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS USM 1/640s f/5.6 at 700.0mm iso320.
Meticulous experimental design is crucial to understanding the evolution of specific behaviors, expecially complex and subtle behaviors exhibited by highly intelligent and very social animals, such as birds. One such behavior is mobbing…
razib | July 9, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
It's been a while since I blogged Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I haven't forgotten it, but once I finished the historical preamble, nearly 600 pages, I was in the mood for a breather. My hunch was that despite Gould's emphasis on contingency in his theory in terms of his narrative there would be only a broad contextual relationship between Part I and Part II, the intellectual history of evolution by Stephen Jay Gould, and the scientific theory of evolution by Stephen Jay Gould. I've finished the 8th chapter, which is…
grrlscientist | July 9, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, flatfish, Amphistium, Heteronectes, transitional fossils, missing link, Matt Friedman
During the development of extant flatfishes, such as this plaice, Pleuronectes platessa, one eye has migrated round the head to lie on the same side as the other. So these fishes have an 'eyed' (up) side and a 'blind' (down) side suitable for their bottom-dwelling lifestyle.
Image: KÃ¥re Telnes.
Flounder, turbot, sole, halibut and plaice (pictured above) are more than just a tasty slab of flesh on your plate. They are flatfishes that spend their adult life lying…
clock | July 9, 2008What a delightfully obvious and visually compelling example of a transitional fossil! A flatfish in which the eye migrates from one side to another, but not quite as much as in the modern flounder. Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong have the details and explanation.
laelaps | July 9, 2008It's getting to be that there are more transitional fossils than I have time to blog them. Back in February I wrote about Aetiocetus, an ancient toothed mysticete whale that also had baleen. Then, just a few weeks ago, I put up a few words on Ventastega, a genus that confirms the origin of tetrapods as a branching process.
Now there's a new paper in Nature by Matt Friedman proposing that the fossil flatfish Amphistium and Heteronectes represent intermediate forms between flounders and their more symmetrical ancestors. Carl Zimmer has already done an exceptional job discussing the study (…
edyong | July 9, 2008Imagine watching a movie where every now and then, key frames have been cut out. The film seems stilted and disjointed and you have to rely on logic to fill in the gaps in the plots. Evolutionary biologists face a similar obstacle when trying to piece together how living species arose from their common ancestors. It's like watching a film with a minimum of footage; the species alive today are just a few frames at the very end, and the fossil record represents a smattering of moments throughout the film's length.
But the gaps, while plentiful, are being slowly filled in. With amazing…
jrosenhouse | July 8, 2008Let's see. An op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Doubleday and Darwin”, with the following opening paragraph:
As I sat in my high school math class one day, my teacher asked a question that I doubt will find a consensus opinion in my lifetime: “Was math invented or was it discovered?” To this day, I still scratch my head.
Yeah, I think I can be persuaded to read the whole thing.
The writer is baseball player Douglas Glanville. He finds some interesting parallels between the rules of baseball and the evolutionary process. He writes:
But humility reminded me that there are rules by…
scientificactivist | July 7, 2008I guess this just goes to show how out of touch I am with things going on in Texas after being gone for almost three years. I didn't know until I saw it on a ScienceBlogs homepage buzz that Chris Comer--who was forced out of her job as the Texas Education Agency's director of science curriculum last November for forwarding an innocuous evolution-related email--is suing to get her job back. You can see the full lawsuit here. I think it's always a bit risky when we put science on trial (as could easily happen here if this isn't settled out of court), since it takes scientific judgments out…
mikethemadbiologist | July 6, 2008I'm surprised that I haven't seen a spate of posts from certain quarters proclaiming that the Lenski-Schlafly dustup is good for creationists. I think the assessment by RationalWiki is right on target:
Mr. Schlafly certainly intended that his letters to Prof. Lenski would have the effect of somehow discrediting his work or discomforting him in some way. In the event the consequences couldn't have been more different.
*As a result of Mr. Schlafly's tomfoolery he has raised the status of Prof. Lenski's evolution-demonstrating paper from the status of "Highly Significant" to "Internet Science-…
pharyngula | July 5, 2008Remember Suzan Mazur, the credulous reporter hyping a revolution in evolution? She's at it again, publishing an e-book chapter by chapter on the "Altenberg 16", this meeting that she thinks is all about radically revising evolutionary biology.
I can tell that Massimo Pigliucci — one of the 16 — is feeling a little exasperation at this nonsense, especially since some of the IDists have seized on it as vindication of their delusions about the "weakness" of evolutionary theory. He's got an excellent post summarizing some of the motivation behind this meeting, which is actually part of a fairly…
pharyngula | July 5, 2008Nick Matzke has a fine summary of progress in research into abiogenesis. He chastises those people who try to argue that abiogenesis is independent of evolution, or that you can get out of trying to answer the question of where life came from by simply saying that that isn't evolution. It is! I've said it myself, and I really wish people would stop trying weasel out of that question by punting it off to some other discipline.
gregladen | July 3, 2008Christina Comer is suing the Texas Education agency. Here is a copy of the law suit. From the Dallas News:
AUSTIN - A former state science curriculum director filed suit against the Texas Education Agency and Education Commissioner Robert Scott on Wednesday, alleging she was illegally fired for forwarding an e-mail about a lecture that was critical of the teaching of intelligent design in science classes.
Also Online
Christina Comer, who lost her job at the TEA last year, said in a suit filed in federal court in Austin that she was terminated for contravening an unconstitutional policy…
razib | July 2, 2008Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, A Biologist Confuses Artificial and Natural Selection:
There's a really interesting article in last week's NY Times magazine about global warming and the spread of weeds....
...Artificial selection occurs when the fitness criterion--that is, what trait or phenotype will have higher survivability or reproductive output--is directly chosen by the experimenter. In the case of the weeds, if we were delibrately trying to grow better weeds--that is, mowing down rice biovars that aren't sufficiently 'weedy'--that is artificial selection. Simply changing the…