evolution
loom | October 26, 2003When Charles Darwin was thrashing out his theory of evolution, he would doodle sometimes in his notebooks. To explain how new species came into existence, he wrote down letters on a page and then connected them with branches. In the process, he created a simple tree. Across the top of the page, he wrote, "I think."
That single tree has given rise to the thousands of trees that are published in scientific journals these days. A particular tree may show that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than gorillas. It might show how the SARS virus in humans descends from viruses in other…
loom | October 21, 2003The Great Lakes of East Africa swarm with fish--particulary with one kind of fish known as cichlids. In Lake Victoria alone you can find over 500 species. These species come in different colors and make their living in many different ways--sucking out eyeballs of other cichlids, scraping algae off of rocks, and so on. What's strange about all this is that the Great Lakes of East Africa are some of the youngest lakes on Earth. By some estimates, Lake Victoria was a dry lake bed 15,000 years ago. All that diversity has evolved in a very short period of time.
East African cichlids are therefore…
loom | October 7, 2003Thanks again for the comments on my previous two posts about eugenics. As a novice blogger, I was surprised by their focus. I expected comments about the past--the historical significance of the eugenics movement--but instead the future dominated, with assorted speculations about the possible futures that genetic engineering could bring to our species. By coincidence, I've been thinking about the future as well, but from a different angle, thanks to a pair of papers in press at Trends In Ecology and Evolution. Instead of introduced genes, they're interested in introduced species.
Before…
loom | October 6, 2003Ask and ye shall receive. In a recent post on eugenics, I claimed that the connection between early 20th century genetics and early 21st century genetic engineering was weak. I asked if anyone thought I was wrong, and in no time I got a comment from Razib at Gene Expression.
He suggests that I'm limited by conventional preconceptions, taking issue on both my points--first about the prospects of engineering intelligence and second about the prospects of a new species of engineered humans. I think he's got a stronger argument on the first point than the second.
On the first point, Razib argues…
loom | October 5, 2003The folks behind the Macarthur genius grant chose wisely this week when they gave one to Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Rieseberg does fascinating work on the origin of new species (that little subject). Specifically, he's shown how new plant species emerge from hybrids. When two species of plants form a hybrid, it doesn't necessarily become a sterile dead end. In fact, hybridization is an important source of entirely new species. Rieseberg does his work mainly on sunflowers, and so whenever I walk past a charming row of them, I think of the weird inter-…
loom | October 5, 2003Today Daniel Kevles, a Yale historian, has an interesting review in the New York Times of a new book about eugenics. The book in question is War against the Weak, by Edward Black. It's a cinderblock of a book, and it's got a lot of chilling material to offer on how popular eugenics was in the United States in the earlier part of the century. A lot of people sincerely believed that criminals, blind people, sick babies, social misfits, and non-Nordic immigrants had to be stopped from poisoning the American gene pool. We're not talking about a few racists here and there--we're talking about…
loom | September 28, 2003Over the past couple weeks an unplanned experiment has taken place that shows what sort of science makes it into the popular consciousness and what doesn't. In the past couple weeks we've had three pieces of research on the same evolutionary puzzle in the same high-profile journal (Nature). One was all over the place--I'll just link the USA Today article as one example. The other two vanished with barely a peep.
All three papers tackle the puzzle of kindness. Why do we cooperate when there are powerful evolutionary forces that would seem to work against cooperation? If I waste a lot of my…