evolution
edyong | April 16, 2008
Of the different types of flu virus, influenza A poses the greatest threat to human health and at any point in time, about 5-15% of the world's entire population are infected with these strains. Together, they kill up to half a million people every year and the death toll rises sharply when pandemics sweep the globe.
Today, two papers published in Nature and Science shed new light on the origins of these epidemics. By prying into the private lives of flu viruses, the studies provide fresh clues about the birthplaces of new strains, their flight plans around the world and the locations…
purepedantry | April 16, 2008Wow. I just saw the Expelled TV ads start on CNN of all places.
What an obnoxious piece of a tripe.
One, the theory of evolution has never claimed to explain how life emerged from non-life. It is a theory to explain how species emerge from other species. Get your facts straight dumbass.
Second, I am toying with the notion of actually seeing the film this weekend. My friends and me were going to play a drinking game where we drink every time Stein utters some ham-fisted half-truth. I am just a little concerned that we are all going to die of alcohol toxicity.
gregladen | April 15, 2008The following video is on the NCSE Expelled Exposed web site, but that site is getting so much use it is broken! So enjoy the video while we wait for ExpelledExposed to come back up...
Expelled exposed is here.
razib | April 15, 2008Via Dienekes, The Timing of Selection at the Human FOXP2 Gene:
Krause et al. (2007) recently examined patterns of genetic variation at FOXP2 in two Neandertals. This gene is of particular interest because it is involved in speech and language and was previously shown to harbor the signature of recent positive selection. The authors found the same two amino-acid substitutions in Neandertals as in modern humans. Assuming that these sites were the targets of selection and no interbreeding between the two groups, they concluded that selection at FOXP2 occurred before the populations split, over…
gregladen | April 15, 2008That elephants have an aquatic ancestry has been suspected for some time now. Moreover, the idea of elephant aquatic origins and elephant origins in general is part of a growing realization that many of the world's aquatic mammals originated in a couple of regions of Africa that were for a very long time enormous inland seas (but that is another story I won't cover here).
The earlier evidence came from observation of the ontogeny of the kidneys in elephants, during which the kidneys take on the characteristics that are found in aquatic mammals generally. That research was published in 1999…
evolvingthoughts | April 15, 2008
In an amazing display of misjudgment, Paul Newall of the (otherwise) excellent site The Galilean Library has interviewed me about my views on the philosophy of biology. There are some serious folk interviewed there, so of course I feel like a fraud, but hey, you all know I love the "sound" of my own voice. There's also a lot of interesting material there for those who want to know more about the history and philosophy of science, and history and philosophy in general. Go visit it even if you don't want to hear more of your favorite silverback.
pharyngula | April 14, 2008Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). If you're familiar with his other books, Clan Apis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Sandwalk Adventures(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know what to expect: a comic book that takes its science seriously. Hosler has a fabulous knack for building serious content into a light and humorous medium, just the kind of approach we need to get wider distribution of science into the culture.
This one has a strange premise. Wrinkles the Wonder Brain is an animated, naked brain working for the Graeae Sisters, and he loses the one eye they…
grrlscientist | April 14, 2008tags: Das Rad [The Wheel], Rocks, humor, evolution, streaming video
This is an amusing animated German short movie, nominated for the Academy Award in 2003 about the evolution of man through the perspective of two rocks on a hillside. (In German with English subtitles -- a good chance for you Americans to practice your German!). [8:28].
gregladen | April 13, 2008Former conservative speech writer discusses economy (he feels that the economy is very strong) and intelligent Design Creationism here.
[Hat Tip: Peter M.]
jlynch | April 13, 2008A few days back I took on Denyse O’Leary’s "science journalism by press release" modus operandi. Now, T. Ryan Gregory has taken on the same press release while dispelling the "early branching equals primitive" fallacy that underlies O’Leary’s claims. Wander on over and have a read.
loom | April 13, 2008Radiolab is a show about science that briliantly uses radio's greatest strength--sound--to bring stories to life in ways we print goons can only dream about. I wrote a story about how animals sleep. The Radiolab folks played the sound of brain waves from a sleeping cat. And so on.
I'm particularly fond of their latest podcast, which you can listen to below. It's about chimeras, synthetic biology, and other threats to our conventional notions of life.
Full disclosure: I am acquainted with Robert Krulwich, one of the hosts, and in recent months he and I have spent a fair amount of time…
mikethemadbiologist | April 12, 2008Steven Novella at NeuroLogica Blog has a great post explaining why ID can't meet the criterion of falsification. How does one conclusively disprove the existence of the Great Vorlon?
I would add two points. First, a good trick that intelligent design creationists play is that they subtly make their 'hypothesis' (such as it is) the null hypothesis. That means evolution by natural processes must always make the affirmative case, or overturn intelligent design creationism. Because ID creationism is so well established. Or something. I call bullshit.
Second, it always interests me how, when…
jlynch | April 10, 2008Predictably, Denyse O’Leary is getting all excited about a paper in this week’s Nature that finds Ctenophora (comb jellies) to be the first multicellular branch off the Tree of Life, a divergence that precedes that of the relatively simpler sponges. Apparently only accessing a LiveScience article, O’Leary breathlessly declares:
All this shock and awe comes from not taking the Avalon explosion and the Cambrian explosion of life forms seriously for what they can tell us about the real history of life, rather than the Darwinian fantasy.
Problem is, if one reads the original article, one gets a…
edyong | April 10, 2008Humans have been blamed for the disappearance of species before but never quite like this. Scientists at the University of Oxford have found evidence that two species of bacteria are merging into one. The two species are swapping genetic material at such a high rate that they are on the road to sharing a single, common genome. Their genetic merger is probably the result of being thrust into a new environment - the intestines of heavily farmed chickens, cattle and other domesticated livestock.
The two bacteria in question - Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli - are two of the most…
mikethemadbiologist | April 10, 2008Several people have argued that if an influenza pandemic were to occur, it will rapidly evolve to become less virulent--that is less deadly. A recent paper explains why this might be wrong.
Basically, the flaw with the 'optimistic' argument is that it is assumes that the virus will be optimally fit given its environment (lots of fat, juicy hosts to kill). As it starts to kill off its hosts, its virulence (ability to make dead people or 'deadliness') and transmission rate (ability to infect new hosts) will decrease to another optimal point where the virus will be able to maximize its…
laelaps | April 10, 2008If you like weird herps, this is a good week for you.
Scientists working in Borneo have discovered that the frog Barbourula kalimantanensis has no lungs. Although the amphibian was discovered three decades ago, it is so rare that the only specimen that was collected was not dissected in order to preserve it. When researchers found another and opened it up, though, they found that Barbourula was missing lungs and that other organs filled the space they normally would have occupied. This allowed the frog to become flatter and increase the surface area of its body so that it could breathe…
gregladen | April 9, 2008The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing edited by Richard Dawkins is now in pre-release state ... so you can order it with a discount from Amazon. Publisher's description:
Boasting almost one hundred pieces, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a breathtaking celebration of the finest writing by scientists--the best such collection in print--packed with scintillating essays on everything from "the discovery of Lucy" to "the terror and vastness of the universe."
Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together…
kateseip | April 9, 2008As a research studying maternal behavior, I come across a lot of sex & reproduction research. As a (very) general rule of thumb, most small mammals are either sexually receptive or parentally responsive - your sex circuits remain on until you have offspring to tend to, at which point your parental circuit overrides your sex circuit so that you can tend full-time to your kids. These opposing mechanisms are evolutionarily strategic - it's bad form to be out reproducing with wanton members of the opposite sex while you should be taking care of your kids back in the nest - your kids are…
mikethemadbiologist | April 9, 2008While many laboratory experiments have shown that antibiotic resistance imposes a fitness cost on resistant bacteria, it's far less clear if this is the case in natural populations. In Europe, the phasing out of a vancomycin analogue, avoparicin, resulted in a dramatic decrease in vancomycin resistance in enterococci bacteria, from roughly seven percent to about three percent. However, the drop doesn't appear to have continued further (although the economic and health burdens of treating vancomycin resistant enterococci make this decrease a good thing).
One of the problems with most studies…
evolgen | April 9, 2008PLoS Biology's press releases have taken another step toward being dismissed as "crap" by people who know jack shit about evolution, thanks to a new press release published last week.
It starts off like so:
Evolution has taken another step away from being dismissed as "a theory" in the classroom, thanks to a new paper published this week in the online open-access journal PLoS Biology.
And goes on like this:
As all students of Darwin know, evolution occurs when there is variation in a population; where some variants confer a survival or reproductive advantage to the individual, and where the…