Biodiversity
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2008
As I have argued before, there is a class of objects in the biological domain that do not derive from the theory of that domain, but which are in fact the special objects of the domain that call for a theoretical explanation. The example I have given is mountain, which is a phenomenal object of geology, and yet not required by the ontology of any geological theory, which does include overfolds, tectonic plates, upthrusts, the process of differential erosion, and so on. At the end of the theoretical explanation, the mountains have not disappeared so that we might now drive from Arizona to Los…
evolvingthoughts | November 9, 2008
...the albino silverback blinks once or twice, says knowingly "Yes, yes", and sends those who do understand math to these two posts at The n-Category Café: "Entropy, Diversity and Cardinality" post 1, post 2. If I read it aright, it means that diversity is measured as the entropy of some metric space, or the probability distributions of that space. Since this is roughly the same thing as Shannon entropy, it is no surprise to find that ecologists have tricked upon the same equations to deal with this problem. More than that I am not competent to say (curse my teenage lack of interest in…
evolvingthoughts | October 22, 2008
That is not a riddle, or rather it's not meant to be, but it's a question worth asking about the barcoding project.
Wired has a nicely written piece about the rationale and program of giving species DNA barcodes and using the gene chosen as the barcode to identify the number of species out there in the world [Hat tip Agricultural Biodiversity]. In it, the founder of barcoding, Paul Hebert, recalls how he came up with the idea:
He says he came up with the idea for the machine in a grocery store. Walking down an aisle of packaged goods in 1998, he indulged in a moment of awe: Here, in a…
grrlscientist | October 19, 2008The filmographer, Paul Frederick, writes; It's full fall color here in the North Eastern US. This year has been one of the best for fall foliage. My mentor who taught me so much about TV production back in the early 90's passed away recently. I hadn't seen him in a few years but still think of his lessons nearly everyday. Many of these locations we shot together nearly 20 years ago. I will always remember him and I offer this video up as my way of saying thanks to an old friend. [3:16]
Autumn Glory from Paul Frederick.
If playback stutters, click the HD IS ON (right side) to HD IS OFF. For…
awild | October 16, 2008
Pheidole rugithorax Eguchi 2008 - Vietnam
In today's Zootaxa, Katsuyuki Eguchi has a taxonomic revision of the northern Vietnamese Pheidole, recognizing six new ant species for a genus that is already the world's most diverse. The revision also contains several nomeclatural changes and a key to the thirty or so species occurring in the region.
As in most tropical taxonomy this research has a comedic/tragic effect of adding several more species, about which nothing is known, to a catalog already overflowing with equally mysterious species. We don't know what they eat, how long they live,…
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2008
There's a guest post at the Panda's Thumb by myrmidon Alex Wild on the new "primitive" ant just reported. Go read it.
evolvingthoughts | September 8, 2008
At Kevin Zelnio's The Other 95%. Much crunchy goodness about taxonomy.
evolvingthoughts | August 31, 2008The Annotated Budak has an absolutely wonderful post on megafauna, hominid impacts, biodiversity and biogeography up. Go read it immediately.
evolvingthoughts | August 25, 2008
Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question.
Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion.
A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a technical problem with DNA Barcoding. Apparently the assays pick up pseudogenes that are similar enough to the COXII mt genes to register but which have evolved by drift and random mutation so they give a false positive for a "novel" species.
PLoS Biology has a lovely memoir of Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA…
evolvingthoughts | August 25, 2008
A few doors down from my office there's a guy with a ready laugh and a shared love of Macintoshes named Dom Hyde, a philosopher who works on the logic of vagueness among other things. He's also very active in environmental matters, particularly those associated with the D'Aguilar Range, which is a beautiful tall timber forested region just to the northeast of Brisbane, where I live. It also includes the water catchment for Brisbane.
So you might think that when Dom and his friends proposed that this range should be a UNESCO Biosphere, government would fall over itself in protecting this…
evolvingthoughts | August 21, 2008
So says a committee of the UK House of Lords:
Systematic biology and taxonomy - the science of describing and identifying plants and animals - is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must act before it is too late.
Of course, this is not the first time this has been said, and recommendations made before have not been acted upon:
"Systematic biology appears to be suffering the consequences of a situation where diffuse responsibility (among government departments) results in no responsibility," the report says.
Concerns about the state of…
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2008The heir apparent to some minor European royal family has again demonstrated his lack of knowledge and trust in scientific matters. The Prince, who has previously said that he talks to plants and consults gurus, apparently failed to talk to any actual, you know, scientists who might clear up a few confusions he has. Of course the environmental extremists have leapt all over it.
He has now said this in the august paper of record in Britain, the Daily Telegraph:
The mass development of genetically modified crops risks causing the world's worst environmental disaster, The Prince of Wales has…
evolvingthoughts | August 9, 2008
This is cool. I always like to find historical documents online; even better when they're free. The Society for General Microbiology has scanned its journal International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) back to the first edition in 1951 and made the archival articles free to all. Since the discovery of organisms is a once-off affair, subsequent researchers need access to the item that announced it in peer-reviewed print to be able to be sure they are working on the right species. So more than most sciences, taxonomy is a historical science, and since bugs (the…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2008
I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I will ignore the layers of irony that the naming of a spider for a fictional conservative offers to semantic strip mining, and discuss the species concept that Jason Bond ("Bond. Jason Bond") and his collaborator Amy Stockman used to identify and discriminate these species. But first, here's the interview (or "sketch", as the Colbert writers call it) between Colbert and Bond (which I can't access…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
I get a lot of Google alerts about various things, including species concepts, obviously. I have noticed a pattern: media from the so-called "developed" or "first world" almost never put much in the way of actual facts or knowledge in their reports, concerned, I guess, that it will scare the consumers away. But the developing nations, in this case Bangladesh, will do so. They seem to value knowledge and science. Wonder why?
Here's a piece "The Importance of biodiversity", from The New Nation, a Bangladeshi independent newspaper:
Wetland ecosystems (swamps, marshes, etc.) absorb and…
evolvingthoughts | July 29, 2008
Electron cryotomographic reconstruction of a C.
merolae cell. n = nucleus; c = chloroplast; p =
peroxisome; er = endoplasmic reticulum. Source
Elio Schaechter has a typically informative and informed post on the smallest eukaryotes, a kind of algae called picoeukaryotes. These guys make up half the biomass of all marine phages. Only known for about five or six years...
evolvingthoughts | July 2, 2008
Hi folks. It's conference time again, and of course we have organised to have the Australasian Association of Philosophy/Australasian Association for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (AAP/AAHPSSS) conferences in the coldest place on the mainland - my home town Melbourne, at the depths of winter. At least it's not Vancouver. So I'm going to be a bit quiet for a while. Play Mornington Crescent amongst yourselves until I get back (not you, Grossman. You're supposed to be fully engaged at the conference. If I see you in the comments after Sunday, I shall refuse to buy you a…
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2008
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason.
There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution - Problems with Science for more.
Jesse Prinz has an essay on atheism and morality, which I think jumps the shark at the end (how can there be atheist charities? Atheism is the lack of some belief, so any charity that doesn't make theism part of its core mission already is atheist), here at…
evolvingthoughts | June 17, 2008
One of the most important documents published in zoology in the 19th century was in fact a rather mundane one: The Strickland Code:
Hugh. E. Strickland, John Phillips, John Richardson, Richard Owen, Leonard Jenyns, William J. Broderip, John S. Henslow, William E. Shuckard, George R. Waterhouse, William Yarrell, Charles R. Darwin, and John O. Westwood, "Report of a Committee Appointed "To Consider of the Rules by Which the Nomenclature of Zoology May Be Established on a Uniform and Permanent Basis"," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1842, 1843: 105-21.…