evolution
clock | March 12, 2009Anne-Marie writes, in Hot Mommas Make Boys:
A study published in the latest edition of the Journal of Mammalogy reports the results of a 30 year study on a population of northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris), which shows that the male:female pup ratio is significantly higher in years with warmer sea surface temperature and weaker atmospheric pressure differentials.
What is the mechanism behind this? Unlike reptiles, which actually have their biological sex determined by temperature, the sex of mammalian embryos is entirely dependent on their chromosomes. This is where the…
pharyngula | March 12, 2009The Open University is having an open lecture on 17 March, and you're all invited! The topic sounds historically, philosophically, and scientifically interesting:
Richard Dawkins suggests that there are four "bridges to evolutionary understanding" and illustrates this with four claimants to the discovery of natural selection: Edward Blyth, Patrick Matthew, Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin.
The fifth bridge of evolutionary understanding is identified as modern genetics - which he terms digital Darwinism.
It's all going to be streamed live on the web, if you are awake at 7:30 pm Natural…
razib | March 12, 2009Like the little boy who can't help sticking his finger into the socket, Dan MacArthur is talking about race, IQ & genetics again. He quotes an exchange in nature where a researcher states:
So, given that we have logical reason to hypothesize about differences in cognitive abilities, why would we expect to measure these by using a single number such as IQ, which suggests there must be a hierarchy of cognitive function? The prediction surely is that each population will adapt to be better at the particular cognitive tasks that are most important for survival in its own environment. If this…
sheril | March 12, 2009Every now and then The Intersection likes to pay tribute to the family that has been kicking it in Springfield for the last 20 years. Today we present Evolution... Simpsons style:
ksharpe | March 12, 2009Originally posted by Brian Switek
On March 10, 2009, at 11:14 AM
In 1857 Richard Owen proposed that our species, Homo sapiens, belonged to a distinct subclass separate from all other primates. He called this new group the Archencephala and based it as much upon human powers of reason as minute neuroanatomical differences between apes and humans. What's more, our "extraordinarily developed brain[s]" not only placed us above all other creatures but gave us new moral responsibilities, and in closing Owen stated;
Thus [Man] fulfils his destiny as the master of this earth, and of the lower…
pharyngula | March 12, 2009This is a cool talk: Bill Gross talks about his efforts to tap into solar power. It's a little bit over-optimistic — how much of the desert Southwest would we have to pave over to collect enough energy for the country? — but the really fun part is where he talks about using unguided evolutionary processes to design solar collectors and heat engines. People who claim that chance and selection can't produce anything new have never tinkered with genetic algorithms.
mikethemadbiologist | March 12, 2009Nicholas Kristof has an interesting op-ed in the NY Times about the relationship between pig farming and MRSA. I'll be curious to see what he writes about in his next column, since he says, "This is a system that may help breed virulent "superbugs" that pose a public health threat to us all. That'll be the focus of my next column, on Sunday."
I feel somewhat vindicated since this is a drum I've been beating for a long time; I've also been involved in efforts to curb the use of the antibiotic cefquinome in agriculture.
The other good thing is that ScienceBlogling Tara, who has published on…
clock | March 11, 2009It appears that the Beagle Project crew will have a trial run on the Brazilian ship Tocorime - not a replacement for building the Beagle, but getting the feet wet, seeing what is involved, learning from the experience, before the Real Deal.
Funded by the British Council, they will circumnavigate around South America following that portion of the original Darwin's trip. From the proposal:
The year 2009 marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth. Without a doubt the greatest influence on Darwin and the development of his theory of evolution came during his travels in and around South…
evolvingthoughts | March 11, 2009Taxonomy - the science of classifying organisms into putatively natural groups - is often treated as a kind of necessary bit of paperwork without much theoretical import by some biologists. Others think it is the single most important thing to do, usually justifying it in terms of conservation biology, but sometimes in terms of foundational knowledge. One thing that has become clear to me is exactly how foundational taxonomy is. Now, historian Polly Winsor has published a paper in the leading taxonomic journal, appropriately named Taxon, in which she argues, I believe correctly, that Darwin's…
laelaps | March 11, 2009I am not sure when it was recorded, but here is the audio (with pictures added by "CosmosFan1") from a lecture Stephen Jay Gould delivered at Wittenburg University in Ohio. There are a few unintentional flubs involving the dates Gould cites (that's 1859, not 1959...) but otherwise it's an interesting perspective on why Darwin's work was so important. Gould's take on Darwin's motivations for developing his theory get a bit speculative, but it is an interesting review all the same;
[My apologies, it seems that the remainder of this lecture has not been posted yet.]
sa smith | March 11, 2009Say youve got a problem. Maybe you cant figure out how to make a gene therapy vector that cant be detected by pre-existing antibodies that everybody already has. Maybe you are trying to figure out how to make an effective HIV-1 vaccine.
You could figure out which portions of AAV or HIV-1 are really important, try to make point mutations here and there, trying to get the virus to do what you want it to do... Or you could just let evolution do all the hard work for you-- Letting random mutation and natural selection identify a variant that can perform the tricks youre after.
A lab has already…
ksharpe | March 11, 2009Originally posted by Brian Switek
On March 8, 2009 6:32 PM
On November 8, 1882 the paleontologist O.C. Marsh, popular minister Henry Beecher, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and other influential men of the late 19th century converged on Delmonico's Restaurant in New York. They were there to toast Herbert Spencer, the social scientist who had gone beyond Charles Darwin's studies of natural transmutation to outline the evolution of society itself. All present, in one way or another, had been influenced by Spencer's work, and they ate and pontificated long into the night despite the fact that…
mikethemadbiologist | March 11, 2009A while ago, economist Paul Krugman described the institutional loss of knowledge in the discipline of economics:
And the latter group, the equilibrium macro side, was so convinced of the logical correctness of its position that schools dominated by that view stopped teaching demand-side economics. (Schools dominated by new Keynesians, on the other hand, did teach real business cycle theory.) I haven't been able to dig up the quote, but somewhere along the line Ed Prescott declared that his students wondered who Keynes was, because he was never mentioned in their courses.
And those trained…
ddobbs | March 10, 2009Evolutionary Novelties ponders placentas:
For me one of the most visceral confirmations of the common descent of humans and other mammals came while witnessing the birth of my children. Having grown up on a small farm, I have vivid memories of the birth of kittens, lambs, and goats; and after the births of my children, I was struck by the similarity of human placenta and umbilical cord to those of other mammals. Given common descent, how did something as complex as the mammalian placenta originate in the first place? The answer, according to research published last summer in Genome Research…
jlynch | March 9, 2009Joe Cain and Michael Ruse have edited a volume, Descended from Darwin: Insights into American Evolutionary Studies 1925-1950, that has been published by the American Philosophical Society. Thanks to a grant from the APS, the complete volume is available for free at Cain's website. Some really interesting papers from a bunch of folks I know well. As Cain notes:
This volume began at a conference, held 22â23 October 2004 at the American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia. The main focus was on evolutionary studies in America before, during, and after the famous âevolutionary synthesisâ…
scientificactivist | March 9, 2009What else is new?
Via Greg Laden comes news that creationists are once again mucking about with Texas' education standards. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) explains just what's at stake:
A number of amendments to the science TEKS were passed at the January 2009 meeting. Here is a brief analysis of these amendments, and why they are problematic for science education in Texas.
In general, the amendments single out topics touching on evolution (including the age and evolution of Earth and the universe as a whole) from other scientific topics included in the TEKS. They uniformly…
ksharpe | March 9, 2009Originally posted by John Lynch
On March 6, 2009, at 1:17 PM
This being the bicentenary of Darwin's birth - and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterwork - many folks seem to have the goal of reading Origin for the first time. Generally speaking the first edition of 1859 (or the second of 1860) is taken as the best edition to begin with - in later editions Darwin muddies his ideas in response to critics and it becomes increasingly difficult to clearly delineate what "Darwinism" entails.
David Quammen has produced a very nice edition of Origin that relies on the first…
razib | March 8, 2009Evolution is a fact. Lineages change over time, and respond to selection pressures as well as being buffeted by stochastic processes. The arguments about the particular details of the process of evolution can be very vociferous. Scientists are human too, and great evolutionary biologists such as R. A. Fisher stooped to venomous insult when backed into a corner (see his disputes with Sewall Wright during the 1930s). But the superstructure of human foibles and follies rests upon a foundation of genuine scientific dispute, and attempts to refine models which map onto reality.
For example…
laelaps | March 8, 2009If I ever have the chance to deliver a lecture on evolution again I may just have to use this clip (from Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder);
pharyngula | March 8, 2009So Ray Comfort is now complaining on the revered pages of the respected publication, World Net Daily about me. The article is full of dishonest misquotes, but let's zip right to Ray's scientific misunderstandings. They are deep and painful. He has this bizarre idée fixe that the necessity of every species having males and females somehow greatly reduces the probability that new species could arise. It's total nonsense, and I dismissed it briefly when I commented on it before.
"I know Ray is rather stupid, but who knew he could be that stupid. This has been explained to him multiple times:…