evolution
loom | April 6, 2005Two of the most important stages in hominid evolution were the origin of the entire hominid branch some six to seven million years ago and the first movement of hominids out of their African birthplace. This week we now get a new look at both.
On the cover of Nature, the editors splashed the first reconstruction of Sahelanthropus, the oldest known hominid. The scientists who made the reconstruction used new material they found in the Sahara, adding to the material they described in their first report in 2002. There had been some argument over whether Sahelanthropus was an early hominid that…
stcynic | April 5, 2005Joseph Farah, the blowhard owner of the Worldnutdaily, is once again demonstrating that one need not let little things like ignorance of the subject stand in the way of pontificating about that subject. In this case, the subject is evolution and his ignorance of that subject is on display for all to see. He begins with the standard blather about how no criticism of evolution is allowed:
It used to be that science followed facts.
Today, at least as far as evolution goes, facts follow theories.
When inconvenient facts are discovered, they are simply adapted to fit the theories.
The theories…
loom | April 4, 2005I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before this guy gets a show on cable. Bryan Fry is a biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and he spends a lot of his time doing this sort of thing--messing with animals you really really shouldn't mess with. In addition to being telegenic, he rattles off those delicious Australian phrases, like, "No drama, mate." (Translation: No problem.)
While Fry is comfortable milking a king cobra in a jungle, he also has a lab-jockey side, using genomic technology to dredge up vast numbers of new snake venom genes. In tomorrow's issue of the New…
loom | March 30, 2005Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberence. She likes to tell stories about little subterranean families of earthworm mommies and grub daddies, cram grapes in her cheeks in imitation of the chipmunks, and ask again and again about where the birds spend Christmas. This is, of course, hog heaven for a geeky science-writer father like myself, but there is one subject that I hope she doesn't ask me about: how the garden snails have…
stcynic | March 29, 2005Yes, that Roger Ebert. In the wake of the recent controversy over IMAX theaters, including museums, around the country deciding not to show movies that discuss evolution because of potential controversy among moviegoers, Ebert has written a column taking them to task for it. Along the way, he shows a surprising knowledge of the subject:IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs. -- Associated Press
I suppose the AP meant to say "fundamentalist,"…
loom | March 28, 2005I'll be a guest tonight at 7 PM EST on NPR's talk show On Point, talking about the new wave of dinosaur science. Jack Horner will be on as well, delivering the dirt about his mind-blowing discovery of soft tissue from a T. rex. Should be interesting.
Update, 3/29/05 9:30 am: The show is now archived here. The links to the real player and windows media feeds are at the top of the page.
loom | March 23, 2005Today Gregor Mendel is a towering hero of biology, and yet during his own lifetime his ideas about heredity were greeted with deafening silence. In hindsight, it's easy to blame his obscurity on his peers, and to say that they were simply unable to grasp his discoveries. But that's not entirely true. Mendel got his ideas about heredity by experimenting on pea plants. If he crossed a plant with wrinkled peas with one with smooth peas, for example, the next generation produced only smooth peas. But when Mendel bred the hybrids, some of the following generation produced wrinkled peas again.…
loom | March 21, 2005Panda's Thumb has an update on the ongoing drama over teaching creationism in public schools taking place in York, Pennsylvania. Last year a group of residents donated 58 copies of a creationst book called Of Pandas and People to the local school. The board of education reviewed them and gave them the green light. The books are now available in the school library.
Now someone has donated 23 science books, many of which deal with evolutionary biology, to see how the board deals with them. So far, the board has said it will review them as to their "educational appropriateness," and has left it…
loom | March 21, 2005Readers were busy this weekend, posting over fifty comments to my last post about HIV. Much of the discussion was sparked by the comments of a young-Earth creationist who claims that the evolutionary tree I presented was merely an example of microevolution, which--apparently--creationists have no trouble with. This claim, which has been around for a long time, holds that God created different "kinds" of plants and animals (and viruses, I guess), and since then these kinds have undergone minor changes, but have never become another "kind."
Some readers expressed frustration that the comments…
loom | March 18, 2005You may have heard last month's news about an aggressive form of HIV that had public health officials in New York scared out of their professional gourds. They isolated the virus from a single man, and reported that it was resistant to anti-HIV drugs and drove its victim into full-blown AIDS in a manner of months, rather than the normal period of a few years. Skeptics wondered whether all the hoopla was necessary or useful. The virus might not turn out to be all that unusual, some said; perhaps the man's immune system had some peculiar twist that gave the course of his disease such a…
loom | March 16, 2005I can't remember the first time I saw the dinosaur fossils at the American Museum of Natural History, but they've been good friends for over thirty years. We've all changed a lot over that time. I've grown up and gotten a bit gray, while they've hiked up their tails, gotten a spring in their step, and even sprouted feathers.
I plan to take my daughters to see the new exhibit at AMNH, Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries, this spring, and it will be strange to watch them get to know these dinosaurs all over again. In January I got a chance to slink around the exhibit while it was still…
loom | March 7, 2005Last week my editor at the New York Times asked me to write an article about the evolution of crying, to accompany an article by Sandra Blakeslee on colic. Both articles (mine and Blakeslee's) are coming out tomorrow. As I've written here before, human babies are by no means the only young animals that cry, and there's evidence that natural selection has shaped their signals, whether they have feathers or hair. Among animals, there's a lot of evidence that infants can benefit from manipulating their signals to get more from their parents. On the other hand, evolution may sometimes favor "…
loom | March 1, 2005I've got an article in today's New York Times about animal personalities.
Update: I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a regular visitor to the gossip site Gawker. But I have to say I was surprised to see the personality article turn up there. Will hordes of New York hipsters discover the strange joys of evolution, of comparative psychology? We can only hope.
loom | March 1, 2005In my last post, I traced a debate over the evolution of language. On one side, we have Steven Pinker and his colleagues, who argue that human language is, like the eye, a complex adaptation produced over millions of years through natural selection, favoring communication between hominids. On the other side, we have Noam Chomsky, Tecumseh Fitch, and Marc Hauser, who think scientists should explore some alternative ideas about language, including one hypothesis in which practically all the building blocks of human language were already in place long before our ancestors could speak, having…
loom | February 25, 2005Earlier this month I wrote two posts about the evolution of the eye, a classic example of complexity in nature. (Parts one and two.) I'd like to write now about another case study in complexity that has fascinated me for some time now, and one that has sparked a fascinating debate that has been playing out for over fifteen years. The subject is language, and how it evolved.
In 1990, Steven Pinker (now at Harvard) and Paul Bloom (now at Yale) published a paper called "Natural Selection and Natural Language." They laid out a powerful argument for language as being an adaptation produced by…
stcynic | February 24, 2005My friend Wesley Elsberry has updated the Transitional Fossil Evidence Challenge (TFEC) and posted it on his blog. The TFEC has a long history in online discussions of evolution and creationism, particularly in the talk.origins newsgroup, but as far as I know this is the first time it has been extended to the blogosphere. It was developed many years ago in response to the constant claim that there are no transitional fossil sequences in the world. This claim is mindlessly repeated by creationists, virtually none of whom have ever examined a fossil in their lives. In order to credibly make…
loom | February 16, 2005In my last post, I went back in time, from the well-adapted eyes we are born with, to the ancient photoreceptors used by microbes billions of years ago. Now I'm going to reverse direction, moving forward through time, from animals that had fully functioning eyes to their descendants, which today can't see a thing.
This may seem like a ridiculous mismatch to my previous post. We start out with the rise of eyes, a complex story with all sorts of twists and turns, with gene stealing, gene borrowing, gene copying; and then we turn to a simple tale of loss, of degeneration, of a few genes mutating…
loom | February 15, 2005(The first of a two-part post)
The eye has always had a special place in the study of evolution, and Darwin had a lot to do with that. He believed that natural selection could produce the complexity of nature, and to a nineteenth century naturalist, nothing seemed as complex as an eye, with its lens, cornea, retina, and other parts working together so exquisitely.The notion that natural selection could produce such an organ "seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree," Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species.
For Darwin, the key word in that line was seems. He realized that…
loom | February 15, 2005Over the next week or so, I'm going to post a couple two-part posts. I've gotten mildly obsessed with two big topics in evolution: eyes and language. There's been so much fascinating work done on both subjects in the past year or so that a single post just won't do for either of them. I know that the blog genre lends itself well to quick hits, but I'm going to stretch things a bit. We'll see how it works.
loom | February 12, 2005Readers of the Loom may recall an earlier post about how creationists (including proponents of Intelligent Design) misleadingly cite peer-reviewed scientific research in order to make their own claims sound more persuasive. I mentioned that when the scientists themselves find out their research has been misrepresented, they groan and protest.
In case you thought I was exaggerating, check out National Academy of Science president's Bruce Albert's letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to Michael Behe's recent creationist Op-Ed. Behe quoted Alberts describing his early…