Greg Laden's Blog

To Jeffers with Jaf: A trip across time, space, and culture.

Category: Anthropology

There is a swath across the map of Minnesota that runs northwest to southeast across the state, separating the major biomes of the eastern two thirds of the country, and for complicated reasons. North, it is colder, south warmer. Much of the moister in the...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 3:49 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Triassic Life on Land: I love this book

Category: Books

The Triassic is old. This book is new. That is a hard to beat combination....

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:42 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

How geology affects your dog's demeanor and the view from your back yard

Category: Biogeography

Does your back yard slope up, away from your house, or does it slope down? The likelihood that your yard slopes one way or the other ... statistically ... depends in large part on what region you live in. (Here I'll be speaking mainly of...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:30 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Pink Iguanas and Disappearing Islands

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:48 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Neanderthals at the end of their days

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 4:54 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Allen's Rule, Phenotypic Plasticity, and The Nature of Evolution

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 6:21 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Scientific, Political, Social, and Pedagogical Context for the claim that "Race does not exist."

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:55 PM • 66 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:40 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting

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,...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:06 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Re-examining the cause of speciation and species diversity in the tropics

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 6:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks