Evolutionary Biology
gregladen | March 18, 2008
Stay tuned, more coming.
This episode 8 of the PBS series in six bite sized parts
gregladen | March 14, 2008"Can we create new life out of our digital universe?" asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into "fourth-generation fuels" -- biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life. A fascinating Q&A with TED's Chris Anderson follows (two words: suicide genes).
gregladen | March 6, 2008There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were "human endemic cretins."
From the abstract of this paper:
... We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital hypothyroidism leads to severe dwarfism and reduced brain size, but less severe mental retardation and motor disability than neurological endemic cretins. We show that the fossils display many signs of congenital hypothyroidism, including…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Jonathan Wells has launched a nasty attack on PZ Myers and Ian Musgrave on the discredited Discovery Institute web site.
Darwinist bloggers P. Z. Myers and Ian Musgrave hate me. In fact, Myers writes, "My animus for Jonathan Wells knows no bounds."...
The most recent outbursts by Myers and Musgrave were provoked by my February 29 blog on Evolution News & Views, in which I predicted that Darwinists would try to take credit for a recent French discovery regarding antibiotic resistance. And indeed they did.
In the course of claiming credit for Darwinism, Musgrave claims that I completely…
gregladen | March 4, 2008It is very common, across the U.S., for science teachers to dread the "evolution" unit that they teach during life science class. As they approach the day, and start to prepare the students for what is coming, they begin to hear the sarcastic remarks from the creationist students. When the day to engage the evolution unit arrives, students may show up in the classroom with handouts from anti-science sites like Answers in Genesis, to give to their friends. They may carry a bible to the lab station and read it instead of doing the work. If there is a parent conference night around that time…
gregladen | March 3, 2008A colleague and grad student of mine, Rob, just sent me the following question, slightly edited here:
A student in my intro class asked me a good question the other day to which I had no answer. When did smiling cease to be a threat gesture? I have a couple of ideas. One is that with reduced canines, smiling became a way to say "look, I have small canines, I am not a threat to you." The other is that smiling is based more on a "fear-grin" than a threat. Under this idea, smiling might have been a way of showing deference to others. If everyone shows deference, it would be egalitarian, until…
gregladen | March 3, 2008On one hand, we have the Huckabee factor ... Huckabee's draw on hard right voters in tomorrows primary may lead anti-evolutionists to victory. On the other hand, we have the Obama factor ... Obama's draw on moderate republicans may lead to a cleansing of pernicious liberal elements from the Republican party.
Hilary Hylton has an interesting and informative piece in, of all places, Time, about tomorrow's events in Texas. You need to know this.
Texas has a state-wide school board. This means that when it comes to textbook adoption, Texas is the largest single customer, and thus,…
gregladen | March 1, 2008The flu is caused by the influenza virus, of which there are several types. H1N1 is known as the "Spanish Flu," H2N2 as the "Asian Flu" and so on. These funny letters and numbers refer to specific genotypes. The H1N1 is the version of the flu that caused the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which was responsible for the death of between 50 and 100 million people.
Considering that the difference between a bird or pig flu that may be hanging around in the background and a human pandemic causing flu can be a few dozen changes in the genome, understanding the evolutionary patterns…
gregladen | February 29, 2008
Photograph of a chicken. Click to see larger version. From PLOS article cited in blog post.
Where and when were chickens domesticated?
From whence the humble chicken? Gallus gallus is a domesticated chicken-like bird (thus, the name "chicken") that originates in southeast Asia. Ever since Darwin we've known that the chicken originated in southeast Asia, although the exact details of which one or more of several possible jungle fowls is the primal form has been debated. The idea that more than one wild species contributed to the early chicken has been on the table for a long time,…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is caused by a coronavirus that is now believed to have originated in bats. In 2004, thousands of palm civets (a cat like carnivore) were killed off in China because it was believed that they were the main reservoir of this disease. Ooops.
It appears now that the civets had contracted the disease from humans, rather than the other way around.
Nearly a thousand people among the 8,000 or so infected died during that outbreak, and no human infections are known since early 2004.
A number of different researchers who have been looking at the source…
gregladen | February 23, 2008PZ Myers notes that Ken Miller is making a case for the term design in evolutionary biology. Miller simply claims that "design" comes from the usual, expected evolutionary processes (Natural Selection, etc.). PZ is not buying this bill of goods, and neither am I. One way to address this question might be to ask: "What would Darwin do?"
Darwin uses the word quite often in The Voyage (a text I'm closely examining these days) but with only one exception that I found (my search was not perfect) this is typically in connection with cultural things .... the design of a road, for instance. One…
gregladen | February 20, 2008This is the February 20, 2008 edition of The Tangled Bank web carnival. The next edition will be hosted at Archaeoporn.
Behavioral Ecology Blog
Thinking like an economist (about Parent-Offspring Conflict)
Published in 1974, this paper is arguably Bob Trivers 2nd most influential paper behind the paper describing reciprocal altruism... Because very few people read long blog posts, and the idea is to introduce these ideas to people that might not already be familiar, I'l go ahead and list the main points/finding, and then go into some brief discussion about ...
PodBlack Blog
She's Already…
gregladen | February 20, 2008A good trick in child psychology is to come to a "compromise" in which the child, not knowing any better, gets what they think they wanted but it really turns out to be cod liver oil after all. Florida creationists got their cod liver oil when the Florida School Board voted, with a worrisome 4-3 count, to accept the proposed science standards that actually use the word "evolution."
The word "evolution," however, is qualified as a "scientific theory." That's the compromise part. Creationists, like young children, can get certain concepts very wrong, and this is one of them. We often hear…
gregladen | February 19, 2008
Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can't find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record, than changes in preferred food strategies. This assertion is based on work done by the Grants and others with Galapagos Island finches, by Richard Wrangham and me with hominids, and by Betsy Burr and me with rodents.
The reason for this is simple. There is a rough correspondence between how much energy one can obtain from a food type and…