Natural Selection
Category archives for Natural Selection
What is a disease?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2008 “Disease” is a big word. I’d like to address this question by focusing on the difference, or lack of difference, between a poison, a disease, and a yummy thing to eat. It turns out that they may all be the same. Yet different.
The Three Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Natural Selection
Posted by Greg Laden on February 5, 2008 Natural Selection is the key creative force in evolution. Natural selection, together with specific histories of populations (species) and adaptations, is responsible for the design of organisms. Most people have some idea of what Natural Selection is. However, it is easy to make conceptual errors when thinking about this important force of nature. One way…
The Modes of Natural Selection
Posted by Greg Laden on February 3, 2008 There many ways of dividing up and categorizing Natural Selection. For example, there are the Natural Selection, Sexual Selection and Artificial Selection, and then there is the Modes of Selection (Stabilizing, Directional, and Disruptive) trichotomy. We sense that these are good because they are “threes” and “three” is a magic number. Here, I’m focusing on…
Hybrids of Blind Fish Can See
Posted by Greg Laden on January 27, 2008 The loss of sight in cave dwelling species is widely known. We presume that since sight in utter darkness has no fitness value, the mutation of a gene critical to the development of the sense of sight is not selected against. Over time, any population living in darkness will eventually experience experience such mutations, and…
Darwin Awards
Posted by Greg Laden on January 26, 2008 Sorry, embedding disabled… but you can see it here.
Happy Birthday Alfred Russel Wallace
Posted by Greg Laden on January 13, 2008 We are reminded, via Mousie Cat at Evolving in Kansas, that Yesterday (I’m so embarrassed I missed this) was Alfred Russel Wallace’s birthday! Wallace was born in 1823. We should now clearly recognise the fact, that the wealth and knowledge and culture of the few do not constitute civilization, and do not of themselves advance…
Avalon and the origin of multicellular life
Posted by Greg Laden on January 3, 2008 New research published in Science on the origins of multicellular life reveals an interesting pattern. The Cambrian Explosion may have been samosamo.
Life history trade-offs and human pygmies
Posted by Greg Laden on December 16, 2007 Every few years a paper comes out “explaining” short stature in one or more Pygmy groups. Most of the time the new work ads new information and new ideas but fails to be convincing. This is the case with the recent PNAS paper by Migliano et al. From the abstract:
Peter Atkins on Natural Selection
Posted by Greg Laden on November 29, 2007 I have a lot of problems with some of the verbiage he uses. But it is all done with a nice English Accent, so he must be a smart guy…
, which is now available for the 
