evolution
mikethemadbiologist | July 2, 2008There's a really interesting article in last week's NY Times magazine about global warming and the spread of weeds. There was, however, one jarring note, and it had to do with an incorrect definition of natural selection (italics mine):
"There's no such thing as natural selection," Ziska confides. He is not, he hastens to explain, a creationist. He is merely pointing out that the original 19th-century view of evolution, the one presented by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, is obsolete. Their model presented evolution as a process taking place in a nature independent of human interference.…
evolvingthoughts | July 1, 2008
Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer's piece, over at his new digs with Discover magazine. Carl points out John van Whye's paper that showed that Darwin didn't "sit on the theory for 20 years" but rather followed a preplanned sequence for backing up his ideas. However, when Charles planned this research, he greatly underestimated the time it would take him (the Cirripedia…
laelaps | July 1, 2008It is one thing to remember the date of an anniversary and quite another to truly recognize the significance of it. When it comes to Charles Darwin it seems that we have too much of the former and not enough of the latter, especially concerning what transpired 150 years ago today. Many are saying that today is the 150th birthday of natural selection, yet this is not really true. William Wells, Patrick Matthew, and Edward Blyth all preceded both Darwin and A.R. Wallace in print, each scratching the surface of the idea of natural selection but either misconstuing it as a preservative mechanism…
grrlscientist | July 1, 2008tags: natural selection, evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Darwin Year, Linnean Society of London
Image: Gary Larson.
This morning, I was pleased to hear National Public Radio was celebrating the 150th birthday of Natural Selection, the mechanism whereby evolution occurs.
One hundred and fifty years ago today, two papers were read in front of the Linnean Society of London. One of those papers was written by Alfred Russel Wallace and the other consisted of two excerpts from Charles Darwin's unpublished writings about the origin of species. It turns out that while Wallace…
grrlscientist | July 1, 2008tags: Underwater Astonishments, marine biology, evolution, streaming video
David Gallo shows jaw-dropping footage of amazing sea creatures, including a shape-shifting cuttlefish, a pair of fighting squid, and a mesmerizing gallery of bioluminescent fish that light up the blackest depths of the ocean. He focuses on the work of two scientists: Edith Widder at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, and Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab. [6:01]
gregladen | July 1, 2008Natural Selection was proposed jointly by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin on this day 150 years ago.
Darwin discovered the principle of Natural Selection, and worked it out, over several decades prior. Meanwhile A.R. Wallace also came up with Natural Selection as the mechanism for what he was seeing in the wild. Some time in June it became known to Darwin that this guy Wallace as about to roll into town and present his theory. By July 1st, a deal was worked out.
They famously decided to present Wallace's essay (without first asking his permission!), along with two unpublished…
clock | June 30, 2008On this day 150 years ago essays by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles R. Darwin were read at the meeting of the Linnean Society in London. This was the first time in history that the idea of natural selection was presented to the world.
George Beccaloni and Wesley R. Elsberry wrote excellent pieces commemorating the anniversary.
laelaps | June 30, 2008[Note:] I realized I posted this entry very recently, only three months prior to today, but since it is the anniversary of the Oxford debate/lectures I thought it would be fitting to throw this entry up again (with a few minor edits). I have also included two caricatures of Huxley (top) and Wilberforce (bottom) to add to the aesthetics of this piece. I hope you enjoy it
Sometimes textbook cardboard refuses to disintegrate. According to scientific lore on this day in 1860 T.H. Huxley singlehandedly slew Samuel "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce during a debate at Oxford in the sweltering heat, causing a…
pharyngula | June 30, 2008
We've heard the arguments about the relative importance of mutations in cis regulatory regions vs. coding sequences in evolution before — it's the idea that major transitions in evolution were accomplished more by changes in the timing and pattern of gene expression than by significant changes in the genes themselves. We developmental biologists tend to side with the cis-sies, because timing and pattern are what we're most interested in. But I have to admit that there are plenty of accounts of functional adaptation in populations that are well-founded in molecular evidence, and the cis…
laelaps | June 30, 2008Of the few courses of value I have enrolled in while at Rutgers, one of my most favorite was the paleontology class taught by William Gallagher from the NJ State Museum (which, coincidentally, has just re-opened!). Much of the course dealt with invertebrates, the lectures being more oriented towards geologists than paleontologists, but there were still a few juicy lectures towards the end that involved vertebrate diversity and evolution. During these lectures he briefly mentioned the Permian temnospondyl Eryops, and he noted that it was probably an aquatic ambush predator, or "crocodiling…
laelaps | June 30, 2008A few months ago I was enjoying a pleasant evening with a few friends when the topic of evolution came up, more specifically the work of Stephen Jay Gould. One of the people in the room asked "Who's he?" and before I could respond someone else did, commenting "Well, he showed that Darwin was wrong." I can't lie, I'm surprised I didn't exclaim "WHAT?!" (although I did think as much). I quickly jumped in and explained how this was not so, explaining in words what Gould illustrated with a coral branch in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. While Gould is famous for his arguments with "ultra-…
sa smith | June 29, 2008Despite the wackaloon letters PZ gets, Im being serious! It really is nice!
I encourage everyone to leave questions in the comments or send me emails if they want to know more about a topic, and I am just as happy to oblige a evilutionist as a Creationist. Especially when theyre nice about it!
So I got a Q from a nice fellow a couple days ago:
Hello there. I noticed your article in regards to the HIV variant that resulted in a new protein-protein binding site as a counterexample of one of Behe's claims (that we have not observed such a thing in HIV). I just finished reading EOE and…
evolvingthoughts | June 27, 2008
Readers may know I have a passing interest in the works of Terry Pratchett. Oh, okay then, I'm a fanboy. Have been for well over fifteen years, since a coworker shoved Good Omens into my hands and mind. So it was with some trepidation that I read that he had found God.
Actually, though, he hasn't:
There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day…
pharyngula | June 27, 2008
The paleontologists are going too far. This is getting ridiculous. They keep digging up these collections of bones that illuminate tetrapod origins, and they keep making finer and finer distinctions. On one earlier side we have a bunch of tetrapod-like fish — Tiktaalik and Panderichthys, for instance — and on the later side we have fish-like tetrapods, such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Now they're talking about shades of fishiness or tetrapodiness within those groups! You'd almost think they were documenting a pattern of gradual evolutionary change.
The latest addition is a description…
razib | June 27, 2008The best summary so far here of the bird phylogeny paper. Also, Greg Laden. Most definitely I was surprised and interested to learn that falcons are not closely related to eagles & hawks.
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2008
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason.
There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution - Problems with Science for more.
Jesse Prinz has an essay on atheism and morality, which I think jumps the shark at the end (how can there be atheist charities? Atheism is the lack of some belief, so any charity that doesn't make theism part of its core mission already is atheist), here at…
gregladen | June 26, 2008... is certainly still in the future. But we have seen a step in that direction in a new paper, coming out this week in Science. This research applies intensive and extensive genomic analysis to the avian phylogenetic tree. The results are interesting.
This paper is summarized in a number of locations, most notably here on Living the Scientific Life. Here, I will summarize it only very briefly. However, there are two observations I would like to make about this paper and its apparent meaning. One has to do with the nature of science, and the other has to do with the nature of…
grrlscientist | June 26, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Early Bird Project, Tree of Life, avian evolution, deep avian evolutionary relationships, avian phylogenomics, location cues, Shannon J. Hackett, Rebecca T. Kimball, Sushma Reddy
Basic topology of the evolutionary relationships between birds.
Maximum Likelihood (ML) phylogram reveals the short internodes at the base of Neoaves and highlights certain extreme examples of rate variation across avian lineages. The phylogenetic tree was rooted to crocodilian outgroups (not shown). Branch colors represent major clades supported in this study: land birds (green),…
pharyngula | June 26, 2008
This is an amphioxus, a cephalochordate or lancelet. It's been stained to increase contrast; in life, they are pale, almost transparent.
It looks rather fish-like, or rather, much like a larval fish, with it's repeated blocks of muscle arranged along a stream-lined form, and a notochord, or elastic rod that forms a central axis for efficient lateral motion of the tail…and it has a true tail that extends beyond the anus. Look closely at the front end, though: this is no vertebrate.
It's not much of a head. The notochord extends all the way to the front of the animal (in us vertebrates, it…
loom | June 26, 2008
In 1980, Walter Alvarez, a geologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues proposed that the dinosaurs had been exterminated by an asteroid that smashed into the Earth. I was fourteen at the time, and that mix of dinosaurs, asteroids, and apocalyptic explosions was impossible to resist. I can still see the pictures that appeared in magazines and books--paintings of crooked rocks crashing into Earth, sometimes seen from the heavens, sometimes from the point of view of an about-to-become-extinct dinosaur. Suddenly the history of life was more cinematic than any science…