evolution
grrlscientist | July 31, 2009
Who: Josh Rosenau, policy analyst at the National Center for Science Education
What: free public presentation, "Adventures in the Defense of Evolution: From Kansas to Turkey to New York"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor.
When: 700pm, Tuesday, 4 August
"That's not a problem here, right?," New Yorkers ask when they hear what Josh Rosenau does for a living. Rosenau is a policy analyst at the National Center for Science Education, where he defends the teaching of evolution against creationism. He and his colleagues have tracked attacks on…
emjohnson | July 30, 2009In a review in PLoS Biology Axel Meyer discusses a new book by Sander Gliboff on the history of evolutionary biology in Germany following the publication of On the Origin of Species. While many are familiar with evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, few may know about the scientist who is primarily responsible for the wide acceptance of Darwin's work in Germany: Heinrich Georg Bronn (see right). A paleontologist by training, Bronn translated Origin into German within four months of its initial release. He also provided extensive commentary within the published translation as well as…
edyong | July 30, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
A humble species of fruit fly is the genetic equivalent of a Russian doll - peer inside its DNA and you will see the entire genome of a species of bacteria hidden within.
The bacteria in question is Wolbachia, the most successful parasite on earth and infects about 20% of the world's species of insects. It's a poster child for selfishness. To further its own dynasty, it has evolved a series of remarkable techniques for ensuring that it gets passed on from host to host. Sometimes it gives infected…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2009tags: biodiversity, conservation, endangered species, Encyclopedia of Life, TEDTalks, E.O. Wilson, streaming video
As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TEDTalks Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of all creatures that we learn more about our biosphere -- and build a networked encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge about life [24:22]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
laelaps | July 29, 2009
Color-coded diagram of a small bone bed containing at least twelve individuals of the Permian synapsid Suminia. From Frobisch and Reisz (2009)
When I hear the phrase "early human relative" I cannot help but think of an ape-like creature. Something like Sahelanthropus fits the bill nicely; it may not be a hominin but it is still a close relative from around the time that the first hominins evolved. That is why I was a bit puzzled to see MSNBC.com parroting a story written by the Discovery Channel which proclaimed "Early human relative predates even dinosaurs"! Was this another fossil that…
grrlscientist | July 28, 2009
Who: Josh Rosenau, policy analyst at the National Center for Science Education
What: free public presentation, "Adventures in the Defense of Evolution: From Kansas to Turkey to New York"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor.
When: 700pm, Tuesday, 4 August
"That's not a problem here, right?," New Yorkers ask when they hear what Josh Rosenau does for a living. Rosenau is a policy analyst at the National Center for Science Education, where he defends the teaching of evolution against creationism. He and his colleagues have tracked attacks on…
razib | July 28, 2009Update: The author of the paper clears up confusions.
Follow up to the post yesterday, here's the paper, Physical attractiveness and reproductive success in humans: evidence from the late 20th century United States:
Physical attractiveness has been associated with mating behavior, but its role in reproductive success of contemporary humans has received surprisingly little attention. In the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (1244 women, 997 men born between 1937 and 1940), we examined whether attractiveness assessed from photographs taken at age â¼18 years predicted the number of biological…
razib | July 28, 2009Short article in PLoS Biology, Charles Darwin's Reception in Germany and What Followed.
laelaps | July 27, 2009
A progressive "march" of elephant evolution as portrayed in Ingersoll's The Life of Animals. From left to right Moeritherium, Palaeomastodon, Gomphotherium ("Trilophodon"), Mammut americanum (American mastodon), Elephas maximus (Asian elephant).
Every now and then I like to browse through old popular-audience books about evolution. Given that I am writing such a popular book myself I enjoy looking back to see how other authors have approached the same task. In some cases I have come away quite impressed, but other times it seems that some authors of old used such platforms to give their…
razib | July 27, 2009
Update: The author of the paper clears up confusions.
Update: Here's the paper. End Update
The British media is abuzz with another paper from Satoshi Kanazawa, the evolutionary psychologist who has great marketing savvy. I can't find the study online anyway, so here is the Times Online:
In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was…
oracknows | July 27, 2009Last week, I expressed my surprise and dismay that the Atheist Alliance International chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I was dismayed because Maher has championed pseudoscience, including dangerous antivaccine nonsense, germ theory denialism complete with repeating myths about Louis Pasteur supposedly recanting on his deathbed, a href="http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/12/bill-maher-anti-vax-wingnut.html">hostility towards "Western medicine" and an affinity for "alternative medicine," a history of sympathy to HIV/AIDS denialists, and the activities of PETA through his…
grrlscientist | July 26, 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…
edyong | July 24, 2009In Lake Alexandrina, New Zealand, a population of snails is under threat from a parasitic flatworm, a fluke aptly known as Microphallus. The fluke chemically castrates its snail host and uses its body as a living incubator for its larvae. But the snails have a weapon against these body-snatching foes - sex.
The New Zealand mud snail Potamopyrgus antipodarum is found throughout island's freshwater habitats. They breed either sexually or asexually through cloning, and the two strategies vary in prevalence throughout the lake. In the shallower waters round its margins, sex is the name of the…
razib | July 23, 2009The Economist has a review up of a book about Richard Dawkins' influence, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy. But it would really be nice to know who wrote something like this:
Her argument that the selfish-gene model is being superseded by other forms of evolutionary explanation relies on an overinterpretation of those alternatives.
In disputed areas of science perspective matters, and who someone is is a critical part of the information in judging their argument. I'm assuming this book review was written by someone who knows some evolutionary biology, in fact,…
grrlscientist | July 23, 2009tags: Richard Dawkins, evolution, University of Nebraska State Museum, Diatoms, Yellowstone Lake, Stephanodiscus yellowstonensis, religion, fundamentalism, streaming video
Richard Dawkins explains how microscopic algae called Diatoms uniquely evolved in Yellowstone Lake in response to climate change [2:09]
What will the creationists and other fundamentalists say in response to these data?
emjohnson | July 23, 2009Primate sociality is linked to brain networks for pair bonds.
Social conservatives are fond of linking morality with monogamy and will be quick to condemn the moral crimes of adulterous felatio while ignoring the moral crimes of cutting social programs for poor mothers. However, in a bizarre twist, research suggests that morality and monogamy are closely intertwined, though it's doubtful many conservatives will champion the reasons why.
In the journal Science Robin Dunbar revisits the question with a unique perspective as to why some species (including humans) succeed so well as members of…
razib | July 22, 2009
BMC Evolutionary Biology has a new paper which will be up soon (not on site), Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link. ScienceDaily has a preview:
Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian 'relic populations'. He said, "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests…
jrosenhouse | July 21, 2009From Yahoo News:
Fish have lost half their average body mass and smaller species are making up a larger proportion of European fish stocks as a result of global warming, a study published Monday has found.
“It's huge,” said study author Martin Daufresne of the Cemagref Public Agricultural and Environmental Research Institute in Lyon, France.
“Size is a fundamental characteristic that is linked to a number of biological functions, such as fecundity - the capacity to reproduce.”
Smaller fish tend to produce fewer eggs. They also provide less sustenance for predators - including humans - which…
laelaps | July 21, 2009
Mentioning Richard Dawkins is a quick way to polarize a conversation. One acquaintance once told me that she refused to read anything by Stephen Jay Gould because of Dawkins' criticisms while, on the other hand, many of my friends have voiced their exasperation with the English biologist's attacks on religion. Regardless of whether you consider him a saint or a sinner, though, Dawkins is one of the most controversial scientific figures working today, and Fern Elsdon-Baker has contributed The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy to the ongoing arguments about the "…
pharyngula | July 21, 2009
PLoS has recently published a highly speculative but very interesting paper on how a particular signaling pathway, the Hedgehog pathway, might have evolved. It's at a fairly early stage in hypothesis testing, which is one of the things that makes it interesting — usually all you see published is the product of a great deal of data collection and experiment and testing, which means the scientific literature gives a somewhat skewed view of the process of science, letting the outsider mainly see work that has been hammered and polished, while hiding the rougher drafts that would better allow us…