Evolutionary Biology
The Scientific, Political, Social, and Pedagogical Context for the claim that "Race does not exist."
gregladen | November 29, 2008These days, many people say that race is largely a social construct; while it may have a place in describing the population genetics of some species, is not particularly applicable to humans. I'm one of those people. The race concept is generally inapplicable or at best misleading when used as it often is with our species. This is why race should be abandoned in favor of other ways of describing human variation.
At the same time, there are political, social, and pedagogical reasons to put aside the race concept. Race is not that useful of a concept to begin with, and beyond that it has…
gregladen | November 18, 2008You do know that it works like this:
Fungus and animals are sister taxa to the exclusion of plants.
This might make the following less scary. Or more scary.
Hat tip: The Lorax. The Lorax is here:
http://angrybychoice.blogspot.com/
(Warning, that site will make noise when you open it.)
gregladen | November 14, 2008The paper I'm about to discuss is a minefield of potential misconceptions that arise from the way we often use language do describe natural phenomena. This is a situation where it would be easier to start with a disclaimer ... a big giant obvious quotation mark ... and then use the usual misleading, often anthropomorphic language. But I don't think I should do that. We'll address this research the hard way, but the result will be worth the extra work.
Here is the basic hypothesis. The null model is that genetic variation arises randomly and this variation is the raw material on which…
gregladen | November 12, 2008It is hard to kill fungus. Well, not really. They can't handle being burned and chlorine does them in and lots of other chemicals are bad for hem. But when a fungus infects a person ... like with Aspergillos, an infection with Aspergillus in the lungs, fungi are tricky. To kill an infectious agent, one typically poisons it somehow, but to ingest, inject, inhale, or even topically apply a chemical may also affect the person. The reason it is relatively easy to kill an infecting bacterium than it is to kill an infecting fungus is, in part, because fungi are phylogenetically more closely…
gregladen | November 10, 2008 Cute baby lion kittens. When they grow up, they will want to eat you. I'll never forget the first wild lion I ever saw. It was a pitch black night, on the savanna in the Western Rift Valley. I had climbed on top of the hood of the Land Rover, engine off, but headlights on. My plan was to search the horizon for lights indicating the presence of the research camp I was trying to find. Once I was on the hood, I was about to tell my colleague, still in the vehicle, to cut the headlights so I could see better. That's when she walked into view.
She was a fully adult lioness. Eventually,…
gregladen | October 27, 2008Go to any bar and you'll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I'll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously resisting mating opportunities. It turns out that males can do this .... avoid mating without conspicuous resistance ... more easily than females. For obvious reasons.
This could be why what has become (inappropriately) known as "reversed sexual aggression" often goes unnoticed, and a recent study of the…
gregladen | October 14, 2008Consider the following words:
The evidence supporting evolution is overwhelming and comes from diverse disciplines, such as molecular biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, ethology, and biochemistry. There is no controversy among biologists about whether evolution occurs, nor are there science-based alternative theories. Evolution is a unifying theme in biology; teaching it as such is the best way to show students what biology is about and how they can use evolution as a tool to understand our world. [Evolution] is as important an idea as there is in science - it is a great gift to…
gregladen | October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like to examine two cases of gene-culture interaction: One of the earliest post-Darwinian Synthesis examples addressing malaria and sickle-cell disease, and the most recently published example, the worm-grunters of Florida, which it turns out is best explained…
gregladen | October 1, 2008Welcome to the Third Edition of the Carnival of Evolution. The previous edition of this web log 'carnival of the vanities' was at Jason Rosenhouse's Evolution Blog. The next edition will be written by Mike (TUIBG) and hosted here, at Clashing Cultures.
Please submit your web posts on Evolution for the next carnival, which is slated for Mid October! Use this handy dandy submission form. And now, on with the show:
Newly reconstructed Neanderthal female. (View larger image) A Very Remote Period Indeed presents Fear and Loathing in the Pleistocene.
"... [the] narrator announces "Today,…
gregladen | September 29, 2008Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation across populations are interesting and, in fact, seem to conform to expectations (in a "we don't' really care about statistical significance" sort of way, for now) regarding human social organization.
Before examining the paper, we should…
gregladen | September 22, 2008Members of the Public: Now is your only chance to comment on Minnesota's new Science Standards. My suggestions: Take out the woo, dampen down the special interests, and please, consider NOT removing biology from the High School standrds!!!!!
To comment, go to this web site and read the context, the standards, and use the resources available there. And/or visit one of the public meetings listed on that site.
Overall the standards are probably an improvement on prior standards. A few questions to consider:
Looking at these standards, it seems as though High School Biology has been removed…
gregladen | August 25, 2008David Campbell is a life science teacher in Florida who was recently profiled in the New York Times because of his involvement in the debate between Creationism and Evolution. This discussion is being picked up in the Blogosphere, and this is very timely, as this is the time when teachers in most US school districts are just heading back to class.
My "back to school" contribution is a repost of one of my more popular bits on the problem of the bible thumping student. This is revised and reposted from my old site. Enjoy:
.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own…
gregladen | August 25, 2008I am currently reading Charles Darwin (Blackwell Great Minds), and so far I mainly like it.
Ruse, as you may know, is a philosopher, something of a science historian, and a science writer who has criticized what he calls "strident" atheism for being too fundamentalist. So that is as annoying as hell. The volume at hand has a large chapter on this issue, and if you read it not knowing about this earlier debate, I think you would come away not being too annoyed, and might even enjoy it, if you consider yourself a .. ahem ... 'strident' atheist. It is annoying, however, that Ruse places "…
gregladen | August 20, 2008A typical adult human recognizes that the image one sees in a mirror is oneself. We do not know how much training a mirror-naive adult requires to do this, but we think very little.
When a typical adult macaque (a species of monkey) looks in the mirror, it sees another monkey. Typical adult male macaques stuck in a cage with a mirror will treat the image as a fellow adult male macaque until you take the mirror out of the cage.
(Experiments that attempt to determine if an individual can recognize themselves in the mirror ultimately derive from what is known as the Gallup Test, after Gordon…
neurophilosophy | August 19, 2008Self-recognition was long believed to be unique to humans. However, it was established more than 30 years ago that the great apes are capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror, and more recently it has been found that dolphins and elephants can too.
Now Prior et al provide the first evidence of mirror self-recognition in a non-mammalian species. In this film clip from the supplementary materials which accompany the paper, a magpie (which is actually a female) realizes that it has a mark on the side of its head after seeing its relection in the mirror. It then removes the mark by…
gregladen | August 14, 2008Stephen Jay Gould and David Pilbeam wrote a paper in 1974 that was shown ten years later to be so totally wrong in its conclusions that it has fallen into an obscurity not usually linked to either Gould or Pilbeam. However, they were actually right in ways that they could not have anticipated. And even if they were not right, this paper still has much to contribute, including the opening words of that publication in Science, which are very much worthy of consideration for many reasons:
It is no longer true that there are more practitioners than pieces. In fact, when I encountered this…
gregladen | August 13, 2008From Sex, Genes and Evolution, a story of publishing in PLoS Open Access Journal:
My lab has taken its initial journey on the PLoS ONE train.
Yesterday, our paper entitled "An Expanded Inventory of Conserved Meiotic Genes Provides Evidence for Sex in Trichomonas vaginalis" was published in PLoS ONE. It's a updated and detailed report on the ongoing work in my lab to generate and curate an "inventory" of genes involved in meiosis that are present across major eukaryotic lineages. This paper focuses on the protist, Trichomonas vaginalis, an organism not known to have a sexual phase in its life…
gregladen | July 29, 2008Did Past Climate Changes Promote Speciation in the Amazon?
Any time you've got a whopping big river like the Amazon (or a mountain chain like the Andes, or an ocean, or whatever), you've gotta figure that it will be a biogeographical barrier. Depending on the kind of organisms, big rivers, high mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, and so on can provide a habitat or a barrier, and when there is a barrier, populations may end up splitting across that barrier and diverging to become novel species.
The role of the big tropical rivers such as the Amazon and the Congo, and the role of rain…
gregladen | July 28, 2008A recent article in PLoS examines the possibility that disease is spreading from domestic to wild bees.Osmia ribifloris
The conservation of insect pollinators is drawing attention because of reported declines in bee species and the 'ecosystem services' they provide. This issue has been brought to a head by recent devastating losses of honey bees throughout North America (so called, 'Colony Collapse Disorder'); yet, we still have little understanding of the cause(s) of bee declines. Wild bumble bees (Bombus spp.) have also suffered serious declines and circumstantial evidence suggests that…
gregladen | July 24, 2008Tiny microbes beneath the sea floor, distinct from life on the Earth's surface, may account for one-tenth of the Earth's living biomass, according to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, but many of these minute creatures are living on a geologic timescale.
This is from a press release covering research coming out momentarily on the PNAS. Even as a subcriber, I cannot SEE today's issue of PNAS, so I cannot cover it directly, but I thought you would enjoy at least this little bit. The press release continues ...
"Our first study, back in 2006, made some estimates that the cells could…