Life Sciences
pharyngula | December 22, 2015It's my first completely free day of Christmas break! Grades are all submitted, nothing is hanging over my head, but I still got up at 5:30am and needed to do something, so I learned about spider gastrulation.
This was a disgraceful gap in my knowledge -- I've worked on insects and on vertebrates, and am fairly familiar with gastrulation in those kinds of organisms, but one thing I did know is that there's a lot of variation in the details of gastrulation, so every new clade seems to exhibit some novel way of tucking cells in to the early embryo. Spiders do it in a cool way.
There are…
pharyngula | December 6, 2015
A couple of years ago, I wrote a rebuttal to a crackpot claim for the origin of humans, which I called the MFAP Hypothesis. "MFAP" is short for "monkey fucked a pig", which actually pretty much summarizes the whole idea. Eugene McCarthy (no, not that Eugene McCarthy) assembled a list of superficial similarities between humans and pigs -- hairlessness, protruding noses, "snuggling", that sort of thing -- and concluded that a miscellany of appearances overwhelmed the actual genetic relationships and the absence of a feasible genetic mechanism to permit human-porcine hybridization to lead to…
pharyngula | December 6, 2015Davies is up to his same old nonsense again: he's in Australia, lecturing people about his theory of the causes of cancer.
Seven years ago, the National Cancer Institute in the US asked Professor Davies to use his insight as a physicist to look at cancer. His conclusion is that most cancer biologists are thinking about the problem the wrong way.
Rather than treat cancer as a disease of cell mutation, he and his colleague Dr Charley Lineweaver at the Australian National University have developed what they say is a new theory of cancer that traces its origins to the dawn of multicellular life…
gregladen | December 2, 2015This is a review of The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution.
Don Prothero
Fossils are cool. Why? Two very big and complex reasons. First, fossils allow us to reconstruct species that don’t exist any more. This is usually done by studying species that do exist, and using the information we glean from living things to interpret the details of the fossil species, giving it life. Second, fossils tell us about evolutionary change, both by showing us what evolutionary events happened that we would not be able to see in living species, and…
gregladen | November 25, 2015Here we look mainly at bird books, but I wanted to also mention a couple of other items on non-birds. I've mixed in some new books along with a few other books that have come out over the last couple of years, but that are still very current, very amazing books, and since they have been out for a while, may in some cases be picked up used or otherwise less expensively.
Let's start with the least-bird like book, one that will be a must have for anyone traveling to or studying Africa. This is The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals: Second edition. This is a newly produced edition of this…
drorzel | November 16, 2015So, a funny story about this. I posted a snippet of a fantasy story back in August, and enough people said nice things about it that I actually got off my ass and did some playing around to format the full story as an epub. This was, of course, complicated by the fact that computers are awful, but I think I finally got a version that doesn't have gibberish characters all over. At least, as long as you're not using the worthless free epub reader I initially downloaded, which makes a hash of even actual purchased professional ebook files.
I was all set to post that-- had the post all typed in,…
aardvarchaeology | November 10, 2015 The Saltsjöbaden Co-Ed celebrates 100 years with an open house. I've been here only once since graduation a quarter of a century ago.
I just saw toilet roll draped over a tree for the first time since 1977 when I lived in Connecticut. Hallowe'en has recently been imported into Swedish culture. It's brought the tricks with it. Is somebody going to cover my dad's car in shaving foam again?
Lack of sunlight is a cause of vitamin D deficiency. It is also a cause of seasonal depression. Now I'm seeing vitamin D touted as a folk remedy against seasonal depression. This is like trying to clear…
oracknows | October 27, 2015I'm a clinician, but I'm actually also a translational scientist. It's not uncommon for those of us in medicine involved in some combination of basic and clinical research to argue about exactly what that means. The idea is translational science is supposed to be the process of "translating" basic science discoveries into the laboratory into medicine, be it in the form of drugs, treatments, surgical procedures, laboratory tests, diagnostic tests, or anything else that physicians use to diagnose and treat human disease. Trying to straddle the two worlds, to turn discoveries in basic science…
esiegel | October 24, 2015“It says here that a bolt of lightning is going to strike the clock tower at precisely 10:04 p.m. next Saturday night! If... If we could somehow harness this lightning... channel it into the flux capacitor... it just might work. Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future! ” –Doc Brown, Back to the Future
What a week it's been here at Starts With A Bang, and little do you know it, but I've got something special cooked up for the end of the month! In the meantime, here's what we've covered this past, fun-filled week:
What did the sky look like when Earth first formed? (for Ask…
pharyngula | October 2, 2015Stop me if you've heard this one before: yet another creationist has disproved evolution. This one has a site called creationdino.blogspot.com -- he thinks dinosaurs are evidence against evolution -- and calls himself "@BeholdBeast" on Twitter, and is actually named David Wilson. He thinks he has an undeniable proof that evolution did not occur. His claim is that there ought to be more fossils of failed mutations than successful ones.
For evolution to be a viable hypothesis, it must have the element of mutation playing a vast and critical role. Mutation is a chaotic - random - process.…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2015Sensible people understand that there is little connection between belief in God and moral conduct. As has wisely been noted, with or without religion good people will do good, and evil people will do evil.
On the other hand, we could survey the nations of the world and note a strong inverse correlation between the level of religiosity in a society and its level of morality and basic decency. The least religious nations in the world are among the most socially conscious and morally decent on earth. The most evil and despotic are also the most theocratic.
Nor is it hard to fathom a…
pharyngula | September 23, 2015The Intelligent Design Creationists are always getting annoyed at the third word in that label -- they're not creationists, they insist, but something completely different. They're scientists, they think. They're just scientists who favor a different explanation for the diversity of life on Earth than those horrible Darwinist notions. But of course, everything about them just affirms that they're simply jumped-up creationists with airs, from their founding by an evangelical Christian, Phillip Johnson, to their crop of fellows like Paul Nelson and William Dembski, who happily profess their…
pharyngula | September 10, 2015I got up all bleary-eyed this morning, and before I got my first sip of coffee, the first thing I saw, blasted across Twitter and all the popular news sites, was the news that a new species of human, Homo naledi has been discovered in South Africa. They have the partial skeletons of 15 different individuals, over 1500 bones, all recovered from a single cave. They're calling it a new and unique species, and further, they're claiming that the site is a ritual burial chamber.
Whoa. Brain is whirling. This thing is all over the net, over night. Better drink more coffee.
OK, that's better.
I'm a…
pharyngula | September 2, 2015 The Upside Down World
I often get requests from students to answer questions about biology -- typically, they've been told to write to a scientist and get a response, and somehow they've picked me. I try to answer them, but due to the number of requests, I usually only give brief answers. Here's an example:
Dear PZ Meyers,
Yeah, I know. Somehow my name is impossible to spell correctly. I'm resigned to it and just let it slide nowadays.
My name is XXXX and I'm a 19-year-old junior in college.
Now this part was a little weird. They're a college junior…but the questions are more like what I…
gregladen | September 1, 2015Alaska is being called the poster child (state?) for climate change because things have been so strange there lately. One reason for this is the extreme warm conditions in the North Pacific and associated (probably) changes in the jet stream, as well as overall warming, which has caused coastal Alaska to become a warm place, glaciers to melt, and (in the farther north) sea ice to be less. And now, President Obama has made a trip there and given a big speech.
President Obama's speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvIrlaXU28A
More information on the President's trip here.
Meanwhile,…
illconsidered | August 24, 2015August 13th was Earth Overshoot Day. The correct date, if calculated precisely, would come earlier and earlier each year, the current choice is just an approximation.
This year, the year 2015, by sometime around August 13th, humanity had consumed as much of what we require from the lands and seas as our planet can sustainabley provide in an entire year. That is another way of expressing the fact that at current consumption rates, humanity requires 1.6 planet earth's worth of fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, wood and other organic materials. It is a remarkable annual deficit, and if it is…
dr. dolittle | August 19, 2015Another new study published in Nature Communications shows follows along with the prior post and shows that ancestral dogs were ambush hunters that evolved from forest dwelling animals similar to a mongoose (or a cat).
These early ancestors to dogs were ambush predators. The image shows Hesperocyon (left) and later Sunkahetanka (right). Image from Discovery News, by Mauricio Anton
An international team of researchers studied archived samples of elbows and teeth of multiple species of dogs that lived between 40 - 2 million years ago. According to a quote from …
pharyngula | August 3, 2015
I'm a bit shell-shocked today -- man, that was a long drive yesterday -- and I stumbled into work today thinking this might be a really good day to bag it early and take a nap. And then I found something in my mailbox that perked me right up.
As a little background, I'll summarize my talk in St Louis. I pointed out that there was more to evolution than natural selection. Natural selection answers the question of adaptedness -- how do organisms get so good at what they do -- but there's another important question, about diversity and variation -- why do organisms do so many things in so many…
milhayser | July 15, 2015As researchers continue to document the intelligence and emotional acuity of animals, beasts begin to look more like brethren, and food more like friend. On Pharyngula, PZ Myers shares a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that gives chimpanzees used in research the same endangered status as their wild cousins. According to Science, "organizations that want to continue working with chimpanzees will have to document that the work enhances the survival of the species and benefits chimps in the wild." PZ writes, "I want to see more studies done on our closest relatives — but it has to…
dr. dolittle | May 25, 2015 Dr. Stan Lindstedt, Northern Arizona University Recipient of the 2013 August Krogh lectureship, American Physiological Society, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section
I am thrilled to see Dr. Stan Lindstedt's review article published in the April 2015 issue of American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology from his 2013 August Krogh lectureship at the annual Experimental Biology conference. My original blog from the lecture can be found here.
Dr. Lindstedt and co-author Dr. Niisa Nishikawa (Northern Arizona University), describe the importance…