evolution
edyong | November 11, 2009Today, a new paper published in Nature adds another chapter to the story of FOXP2, a gene with important roles in speech and language. The FOXP2 story is a fascinating tale that I covered in New Scientist last year. It's one of the pieces I'm proudest of so I'm reprinting it here with kind permission from Roger Highfield, and with edits incorporating new discoveries since the time of writing.
The FOXP2 Story (2009 edition)
Imagine an orchestra full of eager musicians which, thanks to an incompetent conductor, produces nothing more than an unrelieved cacophony. You're starting to…
laelaps | November 11, 2009
The "Dinosauroid", the human-like product of a thought experiment about what the descendants of the dinosaur Troodon would look like today if the theropod had survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, is back. This time it has been invoked as an "I'm just sayin'..." defense by Richard Dawkins in a discussion about what life might be like on other planets. The article itself is here, but be sure to check out Darren's excellent take-down.
My own thoughts on the Dinosauroid will be featured in the conclusion of my forthcoming book Written in Stone.
clock | November 10, 2009Next Monday at NESCent:
When: Monday November 16, 2009, 10-11:30am
Where: NESCent, 2024 W. Main St., Durham, NC 27705, Erwin Mill Bldg, Suite A103
Directions: http://www.nescent.org/about/directions.php
What do public policy and economics have to do with evolutionary theory? A lot, say participants in an upcoming meeting at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, NC.
Nearly 30 scholars, policymakers, and entrepreneurs from both the academic and the business worlds will gather at the NESCent headquarters November 13-16, 2009. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss how…
razib | November 10, 2009In the comments below I referred to the "Price Equation." Here is what William D. Hamilton had to say about George Price's formalism in Narrow Roads of Gene Land:
A manuscript did eventually come from him but what I found set out was not any sort of new derivation or correction of my 'kin selection' but rather a strange new formalism that was applicable to every kind of natural selection. Central to Price's approach was a covariance formula the like of which I had never seen...Price had not like the rest of us looked up the work of the pioneers when he first became interested in selection;…
I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic
ddobbs | November 10, 2009
The video interview above, with NIH primatologist Stephen Suomi, is embedded within a feature of mine that that appeared today at The Atlantic website -- and is in the December 2009 issue now shipping -- about a new hypothesis in behavioral genetics.
This emerging hypothesis, which draws on substantial data, much of which has gone simply unnoticed or unremarked, I call the "orchid-gene hypothesis," for lack of a better name. Some of the researchers have other offerings. It's been around for several years but is now blooming as evidence accumulates. When I came across it at a conference this…
gregladen | November 9, 2009Many people claim it is easy to explain. I once heard a bunch of high school teachers at a conference patting each other on the back about how easy it is to understand evolution. And I remember thinking "OK, so this must be why none of my intro college freshman students don't have a clue...."
Anyway, Discover magazine had a contest to try to explain evolution in two minutes in a video.
Here's one runner up and the winner:
The rest of the videos with an overview by PZ Myers are here.
Did they do it???????? Do the people who watch these now understand evolution?
pharyngula | November 9, 2009Discover Magazine announced a contest to create a two-minute video explanation of evolution many months ago, and we finally have a winner. All five of the entries are good, so go to the link and watch them all!
razib | November 8, 2009In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated:
... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are many cases of women being assimilated into a dominant culture, and their offspring speaking the language, and expressing the values, in totality of their fathers. One inherits 50% of one's genes from one's mother and one's father, but inheritance of cultural traits which are distinctive between parents may show very strong biases. Partitioning…
razib | November 7, 2009I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to revisit some of the scientific literature which Wade relies upon to give form to his argument. One of the pillars of The Faith Instinct is group selection, and one of the scholars who Wade specifically cites is the economist Samuel Bowles. Bowles was an author on a paper I reviewed earlier this week, on the empirical assessment of the extent of heritability of wealth…
edyong | November 5, 2009Walk through the rainforests of Ecuador and you might encounter a beautiful butterfly called Heliconius cydno. It's extremely varied in its colours. Even among one subspecies, H.cydno alithea, you can find individuals with white wingbands and those with yellow. Despite their different hues, they are still the same species... but probably not for much longer.
Even though the two forms are genetically similar and live in the same area, Nicola Chamberlain from Harvard University has found that one of them - the yellow version - has developed a preference for mating with butterflies of its own…
laelaps | November 4, 2009
A simplified, silhouette version of the "March of Progress."
The "March of Progress", the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as representing evolution, but the tragedy of this is that it conveys a view of life that does not resemble our present understanding of life's history. Stephen Jay Gould addressed this two decades ago in his book Wonderful Life, in which he wrote;
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the…
sa smith | November 4, 2009Professor Santiago Elena, one of the profs who presented at the Viral Evolution conference I went to last fall, is featured in a nifty video about watching evilution in action!
Evolution of Life: Evolution before our eyes
Just like I use evilution in the lab to understand the population dynamics of HIV-1 to create an HIV-1 vaccine, Dr. Elena uses evolution to understand how viruses evolve and adapt in plants, which will help us protect our crops.
Evolution isnt just about retarded monkey-fish-frogs. Understanding it has a direct impact on your quality of life.
Hat Tip to Teh Evilutionary…
pharyngula | November 4, 2009Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra — seriously, if I were half my age right now, I'd be knocking on their doors, asking if they had room for a grad student or post-doc or bottle-washer. They are using modern techniques in genetics and molecular biology to look at variation in natural populations in the wild, and working out the precise…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2009Michael Ruse has a very bad op-ed in The Guardian. Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers have already laid into him (here and here respectively), but why should they have all the fun? Ruse writes:
If you mean someone who agrees that logically there could be a god, but who doesn't think that the logical possibility is terribly likely, or at least not something that should keep us awake at night, then I guess a lot of us are atheists. But there is certainly a split, a schism, in our ranks. I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists,…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2009As a coda to the previous post, have a look at this post from Jerry Coyne. Since some of his blog posts have been at the center of the recent dust-ups about accommodationism, he elected to provide a clear statement of his views on this topic. He presents things in a list of six numbered points, five of which I agree with. Here's the one with which I disagree:
I think the National Center for Science Education and other scientific organizations should make no statements about the compatibility of science and religion. When they insist on this compatibility, they are engaging in theology.…
sa smith | November 1, 2009
Im going to be speaking about one of the many ways I use evilution in the lab-- HIV-1 vaccine design!
If youre around OU tomorrow, come check out as many talks as you can!
grrlscientist | November 1, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
pharyngula | October 31, 2009Man, philosophers sure take a long time to get to the point.
OK, his outline: 1) development and differential entrenchment in evolution. 2) application of these principles to culture. 3) what new phenomena this theory can capture.
Plunges into "thick, thin, and medium viscosity theories of culture". I have no idea what he's talking about: I hope he'll get into some specifics I can grapple with soon, because right now this is just a wall of words.
Any evolving system must meet Darwin's principles: variation, which is heritable, which has consequences on fitness. Wimsatt suggests two additional…
pharyngula | October 31, 2009Darwin didn't know the basic mechanisms of evolutionary change. Mechanism of inheritance was a black box. Darwin's last publication before his death was "on the dispersal of bivalves". Why are freshwater bivalves so homogeneous in morphology? Describes a beetle with a conch attached to its leg, which provided a mechanism of dispersal. Turns out the specimen was sent to Darwin by Crick's grandfather.
How is variation generated and maintained in natural populations? What genes matter? What will finding the genes tell us?
We find genes underlying phenotypic diversity by comparison of highly…