evolution
evolvingthoughts | August 12, 2006The Greek English language newspaper Kathimerimi is reporting that there is a problem in Greece teaching evolution to secondary students. Not because of religious opposition, according to the way the article is phrased, but because of disorganisation in the curriculum. 250 university academics have just signed a petition to have it taught as part of the assessible curriculum.
mikethemadbiologist | August 12, 2006By now, you might have heard about the Science article examining the acceptance of evolution in 34 countries. I don't have much else to say that PZ, Shelley, John, and Nick Matzke haven't said already. But I have some additional good news and bad news. The bad news is that we're even more stupid that we thought: 30% of Americans don't know what year the 9/11 attacks were, and five percent can't identify the month and the day of the 9/11 attacks.
The good news is that I was at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory to give a lecture about antibiotic resistance to high school teachers…
oracknows | August 12, 2006Thanks to those who sent me a copy of the article I requested. Sadly, the library at my university has some rather large holes in its online collection. Even some fairly common journals are not represented. I'll have to read it this weekend. You'll all get personal e-mails from me later today, after I finish rounding on our service.
As for finding the paper online at the author's website, personally, I find that to be a very uncommon situation, although I have had some luck in the past e-mailing corresponding authors. This is much the same as in the old days, when we old geezers would…
oracknows | August 11, 2006Here's a humble request of my readers. I'm looking for an article in a journal to which my university library does not offer online access. I'm interested in reading it, but not so interested that I'm wililng to pay the $40 to download it. If necessary, I can get it via interlibrary loan, but they'll just send me a poorly photocopied hard copy, possibly even a FAX. The article on evolution and cancer; so you can see why I might be interested. This is the article:
B. J. Crespi and Summers, K. Positive selection in the evolution of cancer. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 81(3):407-24 (2006).
Would…
sporte | August 11, 2006During these past couple of weeks, we've been comparing mitochondrial DNA sequences from humans and great apes, in order to see how similar the sequences are.
Last week, I got distracted by finding a copy of a human mitochondrial genome, that somehow got out of a mitochondria, and got stuck right inside of chromosome 17! The existence of this extra mitochondrial sequence probably complicates some genetic analyses. One of my readers also asked an interesting question about whether apes have a similar mitochondrial sequence in their equivalent of chromosome 17, and how it compares. We will…
hrynyshyn | August 10, 2006This week's issue of Science includes the results of a survey that doesn't exactly provide cause for celebration. LiveScience has a preview for those averse to reading journal papers:
A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower.
Only Turkey. Sigh.
The meta-survey found:
A dichotomous true-false question format tends to exaggerate the strength of both positions. In 1993 and 2003, national samples of American adults were asked about the same statement but were offered…
sporte | August 10, 2006It's hard sometimes when you're out of synch with the rest of the world. While my fellow ScienceBloggers have been obsessing about breasts, I've been really amused by the genetics of ear wax.
Eh, what's that you say?
Yes, it's true. Back in March, when Nature Genetics published this paper from Yoshiura (and friends), this bit of fun just went in one ear and out the other. But then I read this really funny blog about a person, some ear wax, and an NMR machine, and well, you guessed it, I couldn't resist.
To me, it's been a jelly bean flavor that I studiously try to avoid. To several…
oracknows | August 9, 2006I got this in my e-mail the other day that may be of interest to folks interested in countering the pseudoscience of "intelligent design" creationism:
I would like to announce the birth of CommentsOnID, a Pile-blog and ask for support.
A Pile-blog is a blog intended to offer unmoderated comments and trackbacks space, related to blogposts from blogs where moderation/censure or even absence of comments and trackbacks is the rule.
This particular Pile-blog concerns pro-ID blogs/blogposts. It was setup to circumvent the censorship practiced at the time by Dembski and DaveScot and now by Denyse O'…
evolvingthoughts | August 9, 2006One of the pitfalls of blogging is that you can go for days without finding anything worth saying, and then get a bunch of things worth noting all at once. Today is such a day. So here is a heterogeneous collection of links and topics for your delectation (I love that word, and "heterogeneous"):
1. The AAAS has released a book called The Evolution Dialogues, which addresses the relation between Christian theology and science, with a study guide to come. More power to Christians, I say, if it helps them understand the actual science.
2. Here is a release about the loss of retrocyclin, a…
loom | August 9, 2006Can a tumor become a new form of life?
This is the freaky but serious question that arises from a new study in the journal Cell. Scientists from London and Chicago have studied a peculiar cancer that afflicts dogs, known as canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) or Sticker's sarcoma. It is a cancer of immune cells called histiocytes, and dogs typically develop grapefruit-sized tumors that disappear after a few months.
Some scientists have suggested that Sticker's sarcoma can be transmitted from dog to dog, either by mating or by licking or touching a tumor. They noted that the tumor cells…
pharyngula | August 8, 2006
I've been getting swamped with links to this hot article, "Evolution reversed in mice," including one from my brother (hi, Mike!). It really is excellent and provocative and interesting work from Tvrdik and Capecchi, but the news slant is simply weird—they didn't take "a mouse back in time," nor did they "reverse evolution." They restored the regulatory state of one of the Hox genes to a condition like that found half a billion years ago, and got a viable mouse; it gives us information about the specializations that occurred in these genes after their duplication early in chordate history. I…
grrlscientist | August 8, 2006
Image appears here with the kind permission of its creator, John Kyrk.
A friend sent me a link to an interesting website. John Kyrk, an artist and biologist, has recreated a huge variety of biology topics using interactive flash animations, ranging from animo acids and proteins to water chemistry, from meiosis to electron transport. All of the material on this site looks like great teaching aides and they are also really fun to play with.
One of these animations is a timeline through the evolution of life beginning with the Big Bang. I am still poking around John's site, but I think the…
purepedantry | August 7, 2006The traditional Darwinian view of evolution holds that evolution occurs through the selection of the most successful members of a group. Each member of the group is stable over its lifetime. This view was later modified to include the idea that DNA is the stable carrier of this information throughout the lifetime of an organism. But cells do hold other forms of genetic information or so-called epigenetic modifications -- that generally take the form of modifications to DNA such as methylation which influence their transcription. There is some evidence that these modifications are…
mikethemadbiologist | August 7, 2006I'm swamped with work, and I plan on linking to this post from the old site, so I've resurrected this from the archives of the Mad Biologist.
I go away for a meeting and vacation, and the most important court case regarding evolution in a decade is decided. Of course, I liked the outcome, so maybe I should go on vacation more often...
Anyway, there's no point in rehashing the Dover decision: it was exceptionally well-written. An added advantage is that it was written by a laywer (obviously). Since our political system is chock full o'lawyers, having a laywer restate the arguments…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2006Here is a very nice cosmological and geological evolutionary timelien in Flash format. It has sliders that allow you to move from one era to the next. Be aware that nothing much happens until the Archaean, so it's not broken if nothing happens when you lide to that period.
Hat tip to Jura on the Dinosaur mailing list.
loom | August 7, 2006Last night, as my family settled into a three-hour drive home, I began scanning the AM radio dial. The tuner stopped at on a well-produced segment in which the announcer was talking about recent evolution of pigmentation genes and lactose-digestion genes in humans. This is a surprise, I thought, and I settled in for a listen. It took about twenty seconds for me to realize that this was the work of creationists. I spent the next fifteen minutes listening to the piece with jaw aslack, making sure I didn't get so distracted I missed my exit. There is something so absorbing about the elaborate…
oracknows | August 7, 2006It occurred to me over the weekend that I hadn't updated my Medicine and Evolution series in a while. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a couple of clueless creationists who had wildly misinterpreted a recent paper about how the cornea prevents blood vessels from growing into it from the surrounding sclera as "evidence" against evolution, basing his conclusion on, in essence, a single sentence from the abstract of the paper. It turns out that my humble efforts attracted the attention of an editor for American Academy of Ophthalmology, who was kind enough to forward to me a fascinating…
pharyngula | August 6, 2006Darren Naish has a fine summary of the hypothesis that the megabats are flying primates. It's a tangled tree we're flitting about in here.
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2006...check out Ed Brayton's post. The poor attention span version: ID isn't serious science because it's 'founders' don't have a scientific agenda, but a cultural one. A must read.
clock | August 4, 2006We have recently covered interesting reproductive adaptations in mammals, birds, insects, flatworms, plants and protists. For the time being (until I lose inspiration) I'll try to leave cephalopod sex to the experts and the pretty flower sex to the chimp crew.
In the meantime, I want to cover another Kingdom - the mysterious world of Fungi. And what follows is not just a cute example of a wonderfully evolved reproductive strategy, and not just a way to couple together my two passions - clocks and sex - but also (at the very end), an opportunity to post some of my own hypotheses online.…