evolution
grrlscientist | April 8, 2009tags: lories, Loriinae, Loriidae, ornithology, molecular biology, natural history museums
A young pair of Meyer's Lories (Lorikeets), Trichoglossus flavoviridis meyeri.
Image: Iggino [larger view].
"Can you help us identify a mystery lory in our collection?"
I was pleasantly surprised to find this email request from Donna Dittmann, Collections Manager and Museum Preparator for the Section of Genetic Resources at Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
"Sure," I wrote back. "Send it to me and I'll see what I can do."
I, and some of my lories,…
razib | April 8, 2009Women May Be Sniffing Out Biologically-relevant Information From Underarm Sweat:
Sniffed alone, the underarm odors smelled equally strong to men and women. When fragrance was introduced, only two of 32 scents successfully blocked underarm odor when women were doing the smelling; in contrast, 19 fragrances significantly reduced the strength of underarm odor for men.
...
Not only were women better smellers the men, but male odors were harder to block than female odors. Even though underarm odors from the two sexes didn't differ in how strong they smelled, only
So women have a better sense of…
razib | April 8, 2009David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward John's position. I give Brooks credit for attempting to inject insights from the new cognitive sciences into contemporary political commentary. Politics is a phenomenon which manifests on a grand scale, but its ultimate roots are at least in part in individual human psychology. The empirical…
sa smith | April 8, 2009Alternate post title: Why Charles Jackson is a tool who can quote papers, but doesnt understand what he is reading.
I get this question all the time, and its totally valid:
How do you tell the difference between an endogenous retrovirus that is shared because of common descent, and a retrovirus that was endogenized independently in two species?
A follow up paper to the one I wrote about here (Me, and you, and Zaboomafoo) provides a lovely example of how we do this!
So heres the back story: There are a ton of different retroviruses. Its not one big homogeneous group of 'virus kind', each…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2009This is a response to David Brooks' column in the New York Times, today: "The End of Philosophy". Other respondees include PZ Myers, Brian Leiter, James Smith, bottumupchange, Mark Liberman, and chaospet (who does a very nice cartoon summarising many of the problems with Brooks' column).
Hume once wrote: "Reason is, and ought only to be, slave to the passions". By this he meant that reason is motivated by a moral sense, but at the same time Hume also wrote that one cannot derive a statement of "ought" from a statement of "is", which attempts at naturalising morality G. E. Moore called the "…
evolvingthoughts | April 6, 2009Here is an interesting discussion of a recent paper on the operational and theoretical definitions of "epigenetics". This term - which has a deep history, well before genetics - is interpreted in every manner from inherited histone patterns on chromosomes to parental investment and extrasomatic inheritance. The authors of the discussed paper go towards the former extreme, while Eva Jablonka goes for the other. It's always fun to see scientists arguing over terms.
grrlscientist | April 5, 2009tags: Eurasian Jackdaw, Corvus monedula, body language, behavior, peer-reviewed paper
Eurasian Jackdaw, Corvus monedula.
This is the smallest species of corvid (crows and ravens).
Image: Wikipedia [larger view].
Those of you who go birding will know what I am talking about when I say that birds are so capable of reading human body language that they know when we are looking at them, which frequently causes them to hide from our gaze. However, this capacity has never before been scientifically studied in birds, until now, that is.
A newly published paper studied handraised, tame…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
jlynch | April 4, 2009Most readers probably have heard of Michael Egnor, the DI's pet neurosurgeon. Egnor has been harping on about what he perceives as the lack of utility of evolution - which he, of course, equates with "Darwinism" - in medicine since 2007, and various folks here have commented on what has been termed his "egnorance".
This is going to annoy him. Jerry Coyne has in the past argued that evolutionary biology "doesnât have much practical value in medicine" but has now changed his mind based on evidence presented by David Hillis. Dr Egnor could take a lesson from this illustration of evidence leading…
evolvingthoughts | April 3, 2009Oklahoma lawmakers are singling out the visit by Richard Dawkins to talk about evolution on campus at OU, but they're not censoring it, right? Just making academics fear for their funding, and perhaps jobs, but seeking all documentation about the visit. Just this visit, mind. Piers Hale, a historian of science at OU, is interviewed in the TV story (which means he gets about sixteen words to express a complex subject.
laelaps | April 3, 2009In any book about evolutionary anthropology it is almost obligatory to cite Charles Darwin as the person who suspected that our species was most closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas, thus anticipating our modern understanding. In his famous 1871 book The Descent of Man Darwin wrote;
In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat…
awild | April 2, 2009
Kalathomyrmex emeryi (Forel 1907), Argentina.
In Zootaxa last week, Christiana Klingenberg and Beto Brandão introduced to the world an entirely new genus of fungus-growing ant, Kalathomyrmex. Yet the single species, K. emeryi, is a widespread neotropical insect that has been known for over a century. In fact, I photographed it twice during my recent trip to Argentina. How does this happen, a new genus devoid of novel species?
The answer is understandable in light of the distinct pattern of evolution among the fungus growing ants, revealed in a 2008 study by Ted Schultz and Sean Brady…
evolvingthoughts | April 2, 2009Well yes it was a joke. But it was based on the inappropriate manner in which the well-known work on lateral transfer was reported by New Scientist as showing that Darwin was wrong. That genes occasionally cross over taxonomic borders among single celled organisms by transduction (viral exchange), conjugation (sharing plasmid DNA) and transformation (reuptake of naked DNA in a medium) has been known for a while. What this showed was that gene trees and taxa trees don't exactly coincide. But for the animals and plants Darwin mentioned, evolution still runs in trees.
The other thing I was…
razib | April 1, 2009Richard Dawkins: 'There is something illogical about the fear of death':
The comfort of a dying soldier, the succour for a grieving mother or belief in the after-life of a widower - is it still possible to see the utility of certain psychological aspects in some religious beliefs or customs? [Interviewer - R]
I do see a psychological value, if it does have a real value. I would not wish to be the person who destroys that person's psychological succour. I would not compromise with my public speaking out in the public forum and writing. But if I was visiting someone who was recently bereaved, I…
pharyngula | April 1, 2009
A fish is a fish, right? They're just a blur of aquatic beasties that most people distinguish by flavor, rather than morphology or descent. But fish are incredibly diverse, far more diverse than terrestrial vertebrates, and there are significant divisions within the group. Most people know of one big distinction, between the Chondrichthyes (fish with cartilaginous skeletons, like sharks and rays) and the Osteichthyes (fish with bony skeletons), but there's another particularly interesting split within the Osteichthyes: the distinction between Sarcopterygians (the word means "fleshy fins",…
sa smith | March 31, 2009QUESTION: Do you like pie? YES or NO
ANSWER: Well, I like most kinds of pie. I dont really like cherry. Meat-pies are a big disappointment.
QUESTION: YES or NO!
ANSWER: Umm... I guess if you held a gun to my head, yes?
QUESTION: Great! Here is a nice greasy beefy meat pie! I know how much you like PIE!
ANSWER: ... *blink*
QUESTION: Are viruses alive? YES or NO
ANSWER: Well, I think that 'life' is a continuum. Earth was once an RNA world, and has been growing and evolving since then, into 'life' as we know it today. To me, 'life' started with those RNA molecules. To say 'No, real life…
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2009A new study into the transfer of genetic material laterally, or across taxonomic divisions, has shown that evolution does not proceed as Darwin thought, and that in fact the present theory of evolution is entirely false. Instead, it transpires that lateral genetic transfer makes new species much more like Empedocles' "random monster" theory over 2000 years ago had predicted.
Publishing in the Journal of Evolutionary Diversions, the major journal in the field, Professor Augustus P. Rillful and his colleagues of the paragenetics laboratory at the University of Münchhausen in Germany have shown…
razib | March 30, 2009In the wake of last week's paper, looks like another one is coming down the pipe, Hundreds of Natural-Selection Studies Could be Wrong, Study Demonstrates:
"These statistical methods have led many scientists to believe that natural selection acted on many more genes in humans than it did in chimpanzees, and they conclude that this is the reason why humans have developed large brains and other morphological differences," said Nei. "But I believe that these scientists are wrong. The number of genes that have undergone selection should be nearly the same in humans and chimps. The differences…
grrlscientist | March 29, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…