Life Sciences
clock | September 27, 2006An interesting paper came out about nine months ago about a proposed new universal law of biology, so I blogged about it on January 17, 2006 and updated on February 20, 2006.
Now this is some cool science!
Biology does not have laws. Natural Selection is a Principle. Evolution is a Theory. But the closest biology comes to having a law is scaling, yet there are so many exceptions to the rule, how lawful really is it?
Now, a paper came out claiming a new law: Unified Physics Theory Explains Animals' Running, Flying And Swimming, and it is mighty interesting:
The researchers show that so-…
tsmith | September 20, 2006 The seventh chapter of Wells' book could be summed up in a single sentence: "biology doesn't need no steeekin' evolution!" Wells argues that, because medicine and agriculture were already doing just fine prior to Darwin's publication of Origin, clearly then, these fields (and others) haven't benefited from an application of evolutionary principles in the time from 1859 to present day, and that Dobzhansky's "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" is one big joke.
Wells focuses on medicine and agriculture because these are two fields that we all benefit from, and…
apalazzo | September 20, 2006In yesterday's NY Times, James Gorman laments that lingo from molecular biology and cell biology hasn't yet permeated society. As Gorman states:
Molecular biology is the science of this century. We should be able to build some great clichés on it.
This topic reminds me of a conversation that I once had with my academic advisor and a certain Caveman. Why is that when you open the paper, you never read about all the cool developments in Cell Biology?
Lets face it. The paper is full of headlines such as "New Planet Discovered" or "Extinct Species Makes a Reappearance" or "Probing the Realm of…
loom | September 15, 2006Don't eat your spinach.
That's the word coming today from the FDA: they want everyone to avoid bagged spinach until they can get to the bottom of a nasty outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7, a virulent strain that infects an estimated 70,000 people in the United States and kills about 60. A number of people have gotten sick in the new outbreak, apparently from eating contaminated spinach, and there's been a report of one death in Wisconsin.
There's a fascinating--albeit gruesome--backstory to this outbreak, which I've been researching for my next book, a portrait of Escherichia coli.…
evolgen | September 15, 2006A few weeks ago I introduced the tree of life, albeit to some criticisms. The following week I zoomed in on one branch of that tree, the eukaryotes. I pointed out that animals were a mere twig in the eukaryotic tree, yet they have been the focus of a large amount of biological research. This disproportionate attention is due in part to our ignorance regarding the majority of eukaryotic taxa. We have only become aware of many of the eukaryotes recently, so we have a lot of catching up to do in order to understand their evolutionary relationships.
Because animals are the best studied eukaryotes…
pharyngula | September 14, 2006
We are all familiar with the idea that there are strikingly different kinds of eyes in animals: insects have compound eyes with multiple facets, while we vertebrates have simple lens eyes. It seems like a simple evolutionary distinction, with arthropods exhibiting one pattern and vertebrates another, but the story isn't as clean and simple as all that. Protostomes exhibit a variety of different kinds of eyes, leading to the suggestion that eyes have evolved independently many times; in addition, eyes differ in more than just their apparent organization, and there are some significant…
sporte | September 13, 2006Reposted and slightly modified from Classic DigitalBio.
Some people say that science takes the magic out of everyday life.
Not me!
I've learned some things by reading Science (1) that might give some people nightmares, especially young children. Remember that scene in "The Wizard of Oz" when the trees get ticked off and start hurling apples at poor Dorothy?
Real plants do defend themselves.
Those "Wizard of Oz" trees would really defend themselves by giving poor Dorothy a tummy ache
Pardon me a moment while I apologize to enforcers of precise scientific language.
Okay, okay, real apple trees…
clock | September 13, 2006One of the coolest parasites ever (from February 04, 2006):
I am quite surprised that Carl Zimmer, in research for his book Parasite Rex, did not encounter the fascinating case of the Ampulex compressa (Emerald Cockroach Wasp) and its prey/host the American Cockroach (Periplaneta americana, see also comments on Aetiology and Ocellated).
In 1999, I went to Oxford, UK, to the inaugural Gordon Conference in Neuroethology and one of the many exciting speakers I was looking forward to seeing was Fred Libersat. The talk was half-hot half-cold. To be precise, the first half was hot and the second…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006
From the old blog: Tom Wolfe, whose works often show a considerable pretentiousness in my opinion, has a piece in the New York Sun entitled "Darwin meets his match" [old link dead, so this will have to do]. In this he adduces Zola and Weber, and most of all the 1950s American sociologists whose works stressed status seeking and display, to show that there is something missing from Darwinian theory.
Like social dominance ethology and psychology never happened, right? Darwin talked about social dominance and submission several times, and much of Weber's dialectic comes from the tradition of…
clock | September 12, 2006Kevin has only 5 more days in China so, apart from rain, various farewell dinners are keeping him too busy to do much collecting. Except, this time, it is a different kind of herping altogether, watching the alligators at a farm and diving for turtles.
Anhui
4 September
My last complete day in Muyu; as this day had been approaching I have been thinking about all my experiences. The most beautiful hikes would have to be the hike on the 31st in Xiagu, when we followed the river back down to the trail. We saw many sights that we know no one else ever went to, due to the remote access and danger…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2006Jerry Coyne has a review of the new book The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, by David Mindell, in the current issue of Nature. The ID folks are crowing over this remark:
To some extent these excesses are not Mindell's fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and…
tfk | September 7, 2006I didn't really say anything when scientists announced a potential new way to generate stem cell lines. The technique involves extracting one cell from a blastula, just as is done in normal in vitro fertilization for genetic testing, and then growing that one cell into a stem cell line, while the rest of the embryo could be allowed to develop normally, or get tossed in the incinerator if it isn't used.
People thought it might represent some sort of way around the objections raised by religious groups. I never really thought so because they aren't defining life in a way that's…
clock | September 7, 2006Landscape Corridors Promote Plant Diversity By Preventing Species Loss:
Landscape corridors - thin strips of habitat that connect isolated patches of habitat -- are lifelines for native plants that live in the connected patches and therefore are a useful tool for conserving biodiversity. That's the result of the first replicated, large-scale study of plants and how they survive in both connected patches of habitat -- those utilizing landscape corridors -- and unconnected patches.
I've heard a lot about this study (and several others at the same site) over the years because Nick and Ellen are…
clock | September 6, 2006A microbiological metaphor for the blogosphere (from November 27, 2005):
Heh! I always wanted to write this post. Being lazy is actually good sometimes. Just wait long enough and, lo and behold, someone else will write your post! Saves you time and energy.
Daniel Conover, whom I had great pleasure to meet in person at the ConvergeSouth conference, wrote a very thought-provoking post: Bacteria, blogs, holographic consciousness and The Singularity. There is a lot of biology there, but that is just a pretext for trying to understand what the Internet, and blogs in particular, are growing up to…
jrosenhouse | September 5, 2006In this entry from last week I mentioned Joan Roughgarden's recent book Evolution and Christian Faith, and praised her firm dismissal of ID. Sadly, there are many other parts of her brief book where I believe she has missed the boat.
One such part concerns her criticism of Richard Dawkins' idea of the selfish gene. It comes near the end of the book, where she presumes to criticize extremism on both sides of the evolution debate. She writes:
I suggest we first identify positions that needlessly provoke polarization and learn to avoid them. Then, each of us, one by one, and in groups and…
hrynyshyn | September 5, 2006I'm a little late to this particular debate, but it's long been one of my favorite subjects, ever since I had a most intriguing encounter with a wild member of the species Tursiops truncatus, in Australia 16 years ago. More about that later. I, too, was taken aback by the recent media coverage of Manger's study of dolphin intelligence. What was even more surprising than his study, however, was his flipper flippant comment that dolphins trapped in tuna nets must be stupid because, "If they were really intelligent they would just jump over the net because it doesn't come out of the water."…
clock | September 5, 2006The adventures continue. It's like Steve Irwin, but without the cameras.
Last Leg
(of Shennongjia)
27 August
Watched some made-for-TV movie (in English!!) with the chick from the TV series "Weird Science" and the movie "King Pin." My plan for the next few days was to go to Pinqian for 3 or 4 days, depending on luck, returning to Muyu on the 31st because the 1st was Xiaoli's birthday. Then we'd go to Caiqi (Tai chi) for a day, followed by one last visit to Dalongtan to check on the tin.
For the most part, whenever I am in Shennongjia I am at the mercy of Linsen and/or Xie Dong. Linsen was…
cortex | September 5, 2006Jerry Vlasak is a dangerous lunatic, a spokesman for domestic terrorists. He is also a trauma surgeon living in Woodland Hills:
Vlasak's views are so incendiary that he is banned from ever visiting Britain. He has been arrested on a Canadian ice floe, at a traveling circus, at a Rodeo Drive furrier. In La Cañada Flintridge, he once fended off a furious PTA mom while disrupting an elementary school fundraiser featuring circus animals.
Vlasak, a trauma surgeon who lives in Woodland Hills, takes his belief that animal life is as valuable as human to the extreme -- openly arguing that killing…
clock | September 5, 2006
Hypotheses leading to more hypotheses (from March 19, 2006 - the Malaria Day):
I have written a little bit about malaria before, e.g, here and here, but this is my special Malaria Action Day post, inspired by a paper [1] that Tara sent me some weeks ago and I never got to write about it till now.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a journal called "Medical Hypotheses" Kumar and Sharma [1] propose that jet-lagged travellers may be more susceptible to getting infected with malaria. They write:
Rapid travel across several time zones leads to…
drorzel | September 5, 2006The passing of Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin in a freak accident while diving with stingrays (and not while sticking his thumb of the butt of some exotic and venomous creature) has made a big splash in blogdom. I was never a fan of his shows, so I don't have anything specific to say about him, but he seems to have been very good at getting people interested in rare and interesting wildlife, and it's always sad to lose someone like that.
As a tribute of sorts, I'll bump Douglas Adams's wildlife book Last Chance to See up in the booklog queue. The concept here was vaguely similar, though not…