evolution
razib | September 8, 2009Creation, a biopic about Charles Darwin, premiers tomorrow at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trailer below....
razib | September 8, 2009There's been some buzz over a recent paper, mtDNA Data Indicates a Single Origin for Dogs South of Yangtze River, less than 16,300 Years Ago, from Numerous Wolves. This is tracing the maternal lineage, and suggests that that lineage is most diverse in southern China (just as human lineages tend to exhibit the most diversity in Africa). Here's the abstract:
...We therefore analysed entire mitochondrial genomes for 169 dogs to obtain maximal phylogenetic resolution, and the CR for 1,543 dogs across the Old World for a comprehensive picture of geographical diversity. Hereby, a detailed picture…
mikethemadbiologist | September 8, 2009If you haven't read Paul Krugman's recent NY Times Magazine article "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", I recommend it highly. One of the interesting things about Krugman is that he has been talking about this issue for over a decade. In a 1996 lecture, he presented an argument that economics needs to learn from evolutionary biology:
....consider the question of whether and how monetary policy has real effects. In the end this comes down to whether prices are sticky in nominal terms. In my view there is overwhelming evidence that they are. But many economists reject such evidence on…
emjohnson | September 7, 2009Unicolonial ants, such as these Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), are genetically unrelated but will cooperate to defeat a much larger adversary.
Source: Alex Wild / Live Science
It has been a mainstay of evolutionary theory since the 1970s. Natural selection acts purely on the level of the individual and any cooperation observed between organisms merely hides a selfish genetic motive. There have been two pioneering theories to explain cooperation in the natural world given this framework: the first was William Hamilton's (1964) theory of kin selection and the second was Robert Trivers…
edyong | September 7, 2009The natural world is rife with leftovers. Over the course of evolution, body parts that no longer benefit their owners eventually waste, away leaving behind shrivelled and useless anatomical remnants. The human tailbone is one such example. Others include the sightless eyes of cavefish that live in total darkness, the tiny spurs on boas and pythons that hint at the legs of their ancestors, and the withered wings of the Galapagos cormorant, an animal that dispensed with flight on an island bereft of land predators.
Animal genomes contain similar remains. Just like organs, genes also waste…
grrlscientist | September 7, 2009tags: science, research, postdoctoral fellowship, academic life, unemployment
[Reprise: originally published in 2004]
New York City (AP) - After an unsuccessful two-year-long search for funds to support two more years of research and living expenses, a scientist and freelance writer has offered to fund her research by selling access to her internationally televised death by electrocution and by auctioning all body parts on ebay.
GrrlScientist, an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist, uses DNA to research the evolution and historical geographic movements of parrots among the islands of…
grrlscientist | September 6, 2009tags: nature, natural selection, evolution, The Tree of Life, BBC One, David Attenborough, streaming video
This streaming video is a beautiful animated clip describing the Tree of Life. Evolution shows how life diverged into the myriad life forms that we see today, and that we know existed in eons past. "The Tree of Life" was part of Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, which was broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday 1 February 2009. Narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough (you lucky, Brits, I am so jealous). [Although, I am told you can supposedly download it for free]. If you can, watch this…
razib | September 6, 2009At Cognition & Culture, a review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdry's new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. I really liked her previous work, Mother Nature, so I'm definitely going to check this out. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was a prominent source in Ullica Segerstrale's Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate.
gregladen | September 6, 2009The Bloggingheads with David Dobbs and Moi is now up at Blogginheads, and embedded here:
I had just posted a review of Dobb's book, Reef Madness, which I enjoyed a great deal, and here we discuss the book in more detail. I left out a lot of detail, especially the exciting multi-part ending, in my review. You'll hear more about what happened to the competing reef theories and to Alexander Agassiz in this hour long bla-bla-blawginghead's interview.
David Dobbs' main web site is here.
Added: Note something funny (as in funny strange) happening at about 23 or 24 minutes.
grrlscientist | September 6, 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…
sa smith | September 3, 2009Hey, remember a while back when I mentioned how scientists used evolution (random mutation and natural selection) in the lab to 'perfect' gene therapy vectors?
Theyve just one it again! In a BIG way!
Molecular Evolution of Adeno-associated Virus for Enhanced Glial Gene Delivery.
These folks were looking for a way to get man-made viruses to deliver therapeutic genes to infected/defective cells. Now, you dont want these viruses to infect EVERY cell of a sick person, necessarily, you want to target the specific, sick cells. A golden target for these folks is glial cells-- as their…
gregladen | September 2, 2009Today's falsehood is the idea that individual animals act for the benefit of their own species.
Let me give you an example. When I was a kid, I watched a nature show about cougars. The show 'documented' a single female cougar going about doing cougar-things and being generally cougar-like. At one point she had cute little baby cougar kittens.
Then a flood came. The stream near her chosen lair swelled its banks and threatened to drown the kittens. So, she carried one of the kittens up the hill to a new lair. She went back to get the second kitten, and the flood waters were even higher…
ddobbs | September 2, 2009
I was pleased to see my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral written up in a couple of venues recently. Over at The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael Johnson, who does on history and philosophy of science, looks at the "terrific argument" that the book follows -- an argument simultaneously about how coral reefs form, how to do science, and (a third layer out), creationism versus empiricism. A nice write-up -- you can't go wrong starting a piece about the creationism-empiricism debate (among other things) with an atomic blast.
The book is also mentioned…
mikethemadbiologist | September 1, 2009During one of the many framing-related flare ups (kinda like zits, aren't they?), I argued that biologists have done the following things well while confronting creationism:
Calling creationists fucking morons (because they are).
Arguing that a better understanding of how life evolved is good in and of itself, and can imbue us with a certain sense of wonder.
Refuting specific creationist claims.
But this is what I thought was missing:
What we rarely do is make an affirmative, positive argument for evolution (as opposed to against creationism). I proposed one particular argument: we can't do…
razib | August 30, 2009Thomas Mailmund is going ape over chimps & humans again, Patterns of autosomal divergence between the human and chimpanzee genomes support an allopatric model of speciation. A review of a paper of the same name.
grrlscientist | August 30, 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…
oracknows | August 30, 2009It was just a high school marching band, like so many other high school bands in this country, a band that no one outside of the area of Sedalia, Missouri would be likely to have heard of, were it not for a breathtakingly stupid action by its school superintendent. You see, the band had an idea for a clever and amusing way to illustrate their theme for the year of the "Brass Evolutions." It was this T-shirt, to be worn by band members and reported by the Sedalia Democrat:
When I saw it by way of ERV, I thought it was kind of cute and a rather clever way of illustrating the theme. As the…
razib | August 29, 2009Dienekes points me to a new paper, European Population Genetic Substructure: Further Definition of Ancestry Informative Markers for Distinguishing Among Diverse European Ethnic Groups. You've seen this song & dance before:
Population substructure in Japan
Population substructure of Mexican Mestizos
European population substructure
Genetic Map of East Asia
The genetics of Fenno-Scandinavia
Finns as European outliers
Uyghurs are hybrids
Genetic structure of Eastern European populations
Genetic map of Europe; genes vary as a function of distance
More genetic maps of Europe
Human population…
pharyngula | August 28, 2009Tips for flourishing after a mass extinction. Ceratites nodosus (MCZ-7232) (A), from the Triassic of Germany, was similar to the ceratitid ammonoid species that thrived in the water column in the Early Triassic (1), while bottom-dwelling species languished. Key to the ceratitids' rapid success after the end-Permian mass extinction were their ecological tolerances, which may be inferred by reference to their closest living relatives, the coleoids (squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish), including the low-oxygen specialist Vampyroteuthis infernalis (B).
This picture has a little story behind it.…
razib | August 27, 2009Just a quick follow-up to the previous post, as I finished watching the whole Behe-McWhorter exchange. Notes:
1) McWhorter is an atheist, and implies he's always been an atheist (or at least not a theist).
2) He's really impressed by Michael Behe's arguments, to the point where he might assent to Michael Behe being the Isaac Newton of evolutionary genetics (though his summation of some of the jaw-dropping talking points in The Edge of Evolution leaves me a bit skeptical as to McWhorter's deep knowledge of basic evolutionary ideas).
3) Part of the issue really has to do with the…