Life Sciences
clock | July 5, 2006I wrote this book review back on February 18, 2006. Under the fold...
I see that Joan Roughgarden has a new paper in Science this week: Reproductive Social Behavior: Cooperative Games to Replace Sexual Selection
Theories about sexual selection can be traced back to Darwin in 1871. He proposed that males fertilize as many females as possible with inexpensive sperm, whereas females, with a limited supply of large eggs, select the genetically highest quality males to endow their offspring with superior capabilities. Since its proposal, problems with this narrative have continued to accumulate,…
tsmith | June 29, 2006 People make terrible jokes about "mad cow" disease. ("Why is PMS called PMS? Because mad cow was already taken.") Pundits use it as an example of an over-hyped disease (and to be fair, estimates of total cases due to the consumption of contaminated beef in the UK have varied widely, ranging from a few thousand up to well over 100,000). Vegetarians note it as one benefit that comes from their soyburgers. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion.
So-called "mad cow" disease, in humans, is a progressive neurological disorder more correctly called variant Creuzfield-Jacob disease (vCJD).…
clock | June 29, 2006The fifth installment just came in - read under the fold. (Oh, and BTW, I was wrong - the installments ARE in the correct chronological order)
Muyu, extended stay, report
(Mu - you, as in newt)
I never thought it would come to this, having to give a report on my finds and experiences in the town, but fortunately there has been enough of a mix of activity to keep me interested.
My town experience started when we left Dongxi on the 14th of June and headed back to Muyu. From the 14th until the 23rd I stayed in Muyu (that's 10 days!!) and on occasion went to some places nearby.
15 - 16 June…
tqa | June 28, 2006The rise of factory farming over the last half-century has resulted in a crisis for family farms. Factory farming benefits from the economy of scale, producing much, much more of whatever their product is - milk, beef, pork, whatever - at costs per unit that are far lower than a family farm can achieve. This allows the factory farms to sell their products cheaper than the family farmer can, driving the small farms out of business.
Over the past decade or two, the decline of the family farm has received a fair amount of attention, mostly focused on the people who are affected, but there's…
pharyngula | June 27, 2006
One of many open questions in evolution is the nature of bilaterian origins—when the first bilaterally symmetrical common ancestor (the Last Common Bilaterian, or LCB) to all of us mammals and insects and molluscs and polychaetes and so forth arose, and what it looked like. We know it had to have been small, soft, and wormlike, and that it lived over 600 million years ago, but unfortunately, it wasn't the kind of beast likely to be preserved in fossil deposits.
We do have a tool to help us get a glimpse of it, though: the analysis of extant organisms, searching for those common features that…
clock | June 27, 2006
The origin and early evolution of circadian clocks are far from clear. It is now widely believed that the clocks in cyanobacteria and the clocks in Eukarya evolved independently from each other. It is also possible that some Archaea possess clock - at least they have clock genes, thought to have arived there by lateral transfer from cyanobacteria.[continued under the fold]
It is not well known, though, if the clocks in major groups of Eukarya - Protista, Plants, Fungi and Animals - originated independently or out of a common ancestral clock. On one hand, the internal logic of the clock…
clock | June 23, 2006Here is the fourth part of Kevin's journey. I have just realized that I posted the previous two in the wrong order, thus post #2 should be third and post #3 should be second. I was going by the order in which I received them instead of dates in the journal. And I am doing these things late at night (having them automatically published at a preset time - noon), doing all the HTML for italicising the species names, running the spellcheck, expanding IM-style contractions into full-length words, breaking long paragraphs into multiples of shorter ones for ease of reading on a computer screen,…
clock | June 23, 2006 This was an early post of mine building upon George Lakoff analysis of the psychology underlying political ideology. It was first published on September 04, 2004 (mildly edited):
I keep going back to George Lakoff's "Moral Politics", as I did "here"
and "here", because I believe this book provides very important insights into the psychological sources of ideology, or worldview, from which all political stances logically follow. As I stated "before", it is not a perfect book. First, it is written in a pretty dry academic style. Long lists, in my opinion, should be taken out of the main body…
tqa | June 21, 2006There are a number of places on this planet where the signal of evolution is readily apparent to anyone who cares to look. Most of those places are islands. It's no coincidence that Darwin made the Galapagos famous, or that Wallace did his most important work in the Malay Archipelago. As helpful as those places were to the discovery of evolution, they pale in comparison with the Hawaiian Islands, and I'm not saying that because I work there. We've got examples of evolution out here that will knock your socks off.
More than ninety percent of everything that is native to the above sea level…
stcynic | June 20, 2006Please allow me one more post on the subject of DaveScot's comments about guided vs unguided evolution. This is a familiar refrain from ID advocates, what we might call "ID minimalism" - the position that even if the theory of common descent is absolutely true and all modern life forms are related via descent with modification, that descent was guided by God (no, I'm not going to engage in their ridiculous sophistry of calling it "the intelligent designer" - they're talking about God, they know it and so does everyone else, and there is no reason to play pretend in this regard). Here's how…
grrlscientist | June 19, 2006
Soccer-playing carrion crow, Corvus corone
(This is a captive domesticated bird).
Image: Koichi Harada, Asahi Shimbun/AP.
Birds in Science
Filling a gap in the evolution of birds, scientists have dug up fossils of a bird, Gansus yumenensis (pictured), that lived 110 million years ago and looked remarkably like a small modern-day waterfowl. The finding, reported recently in the journal Science, supports the notion that all living birds, from ostriches to ducks to hummingbirds, descended from an ancestor that lived by the shore. In 2004, researchers led by Hai-lu You of the Chinese Academy…
loom | June 17, 2006Two hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts, an African lion killed someone. Along with a meal, the big cat got a wicked stomachache. Today a record of that unfortunate death still survives, in the bacteria that make big cats sick.
The trail of this strange story starts in the 1980s, when scientists discovered that ulcers are caused by bacteria known as known as Helicobacter pylori. H. pylori is found in people around the world, and scientists learned how to recognize the different strains they carried. Based on the patterns of the strains, a team of scientists concluded in 2003 that…
clock | June 16, 2006This was first posted on http://www.jregrassroots.org/ forums on July 10, 2004, then republished on Science And Politics on August 18, 2004. That was to be just the first, and most raw, post on this topic on my blog. It was followed by about a 100 more posts building on this idea, modifying it, and changing my mind in the process. You can see some of the better follow-ups here. Also, I have since then read Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz, which is a much better and more scholarly work than E.J.Graff's book. Below the fold…
scientificactivist | June 14, 2006I see that Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science recently republished an interesting series of posts on animal rights and scientific ethics that originally came out around the same time I was writing about my experience at an animal rights protest. In light of that, we'll keep this discussion going with the following post, which I wrote back in January as a follow-up to some of the comments on my post about the animal rights protest.(16 January 2006) This post began as a response to a comment a friend left on my last post, "Caught in the Line of Fire", but once I started I got…
clock | June 14, 2006I wrote this post on February 27, 2005. Provocative? You decide....
I am happy, along with at least half of the blogosphere, that Billmon is back. One of his recent posts caught my eye, as it was comparing current treatment of science by the Bush Administration to the treatment of science by the Stalin Administration back in the early days of the USSR, notably Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. The US scientists today are very unhappy about this state of things and are pondering ways to fightback (hat tip: Chris Mooney)
I looked around the Internets to see what is there about Lysenko and I found a…
evolvingthoughts | June 13, 2006[This is another repost from my old blog. I am sitting at home suffering with a hole in my jaw where a tooth, or its remnants was extracted with extreme prejudice, so I don't feel much like blogging.]
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.
After a decent period to mourn the death of one of the greatest biologists of the century on any measure, perhaps it is time now to reassess how Mayr's legacy is to be presented. I have no competence to debate his scientific ideas - if speciation is mostly allopatric, or if it is…
pharyngula | June 13, 2006Seed has an interview with Joan Roughgarden, somewhat controversial evolutionary biologist and author of Evolution's Rainbow : Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here's the short summary of her basic thesis:
Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection--she's no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that…
tsmith | June 13, 2006 Sometimes it's amazing just how little we know about the microbes around us. For precious few microbes, we know a good deal about virulence factors--genes and proteins that, when present, increase the severity of disease either in animal models or in humans (or both). However, much of this research has been done investigating acute infectious diseases, where one is infected, becomes ill, and gets better in the course of a few weeks to a month. Much less is known about factors that affect long-term (or chronic) infection. A recent study addressed one gap in this research, examining what…
hrynyshyn | June 12, 2006It's that time of year, when the International Whaling Commission gets together and pretends its decisions will be based on the best available science. In addition to poorly serving the planet's cetaceans, these annual gatherings are embarrassments for both the pro-whaling members and the animal-rights gang. It's also a case study in the politicization and abuse of the scientific method.
For those familiar with the IWC, it's the recognized world authority on whaling. Formed about 60 years ago after it became bleedingly obvious that the industry required regulation -- the near extinction of…
retrospectacle | June 12, 2006As a newly-minted ScienceBlogger, now I get to chime-in on all the fun "Ask A ScienceBlogger" questions. This week's question is:
"Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?"
As an undergrad, I had a pretty hard time choosing a major. This wasn't due to my lack of finding something I liked to do, I just didn't want to choose between a lot of fascinating fields. Finally I settled on what I considered the "final fronteir" in medical science: neuroscience, and neither time nor money (…