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Evolution, Life Sciences, Science Education, Human Evolution, and Stuff
Welcome to Greg Laden's Blog.
It turns out that a recently discovered population of land iguanas on the Galapagos is probably a new species that represents the basal (original) form of Galapagos land iguana. Moreover, this iguana is found in an unexpected place, according to a paper just coming out...
Posted by Greg Laden at 1:48 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What was Neanderthal-Modern Human interaction really like? Fifty four teeth (some of which are fragments) and nine other bones dating to about 40-43,000 years ago represent the "most recent, and largest, sample of southern Iberian late Neanderthals currently known." These and some closely related...
Posted by Greg Laden at 4:54 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Allen's Rule. One of those things you learn in graduate school along with Bergmann's Rule and Cope's Rule. It is all about body size. Cope's Rule ... which is a rule of thumb and not an absolute ... says that over time the species in...
Posted by Greg Laden at 6:21 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
These days, many people say that race is largely a social construct; while it may have a place in describing the population genetics of some species, is not particularly applicable to humans. I'm one of those people. The race concept is generally inapplicable or at...
Posted by Greg Laden at 10:55 PM • 60 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Homo floresiensis more widely known as the "Hobbit," may have had arms that were very different from those of modern humans. A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution explores the anatomy of H. floresiensis. To explore this we first have...
Posted by Greg Laden at 10:40 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture,...
Posted by Greg Laden at 10:06 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: South America
Did Past Climate Changes Promote Speciation in the Amazon? Any time you've got a whopping big river like the Amazon (or a mountain chain like the Andes, or an ocean, or whatever), you've gotta figure that it will be a biogeographical barrier. Depending on the...
Posted by Greg Laden at 6:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were "human endemic cretins." From the abstract of this paper: ... We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens....
Posted by Greg Laden at 8:46 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Across Africa, and to some extent Asia, existing large parks and preserves are being combined into very large parks in order to serve several important functions. One is to make the parks so large that there will be interior areas that are impractical for most...
Posted by Greg Laden at 4:16 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses,...
Posted by Greg Laden at 1:06 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
