Science
evolgen | April 21, 2006Nature has a news article on the resignation of Teri Markow from her position as president of the Society for the Study of Evolution. I don't know much about what happened other than the stuff in the Nature piece, but apparently Markow was frustrated by the treatment of women within the administrative ranks of scientific professional societies. I have some quotes and comments below the fold.
I hardly know Markow -- I have met her and a few of her students briefly -- so I am in no position to evaluate her personally. She does excellent research in a top notch department. She is also the…
pharyngula | April 21, 2006a–c, The wing spots on male flies of the Drosophila genus. Drosophila tristis (a) and D. elegans (b) have wing spots that have arisen during convergent evolution. Drosophila gunungcola (c) instead evolved from a spotted ancestor. d, Males wave their wings to display the spots during elaborate courtship dances.
It's all about style. When you're out and about looking for mates, what tends to draw the eye first are general signals—health and vigor, symmetry, absence of blemishes or injuries, that sort of thing—but then we also look for that special something, that je ne sais quoi, that dash of…
pharyngula | April 19, 2006My pedipalps were slavering at the news of a symposium on spider sex to be held on the Catalan coast of Spain. Ah, if only I had a legitimate excuse (other than prurience) and a budget that could handle the expense…
pharyngula | April 19, 2006
Here's what seems to be a relatively simple problem in evolution. Within the Drosophila genus (and in diverse insects in general), species have evolved patterned spots on their wings, which seem to be important in species-specific courtship. Gompel et al. have been exploring in depth one particular problem, illustrated below: how did a spot-free ancestral fly species acquire that distinctive dark patch near the front tip of the wing in Drosophila biarmipes? Their answer involves dissecting the molecular regulators of pattern in the fly wing, doing comparative sequence analyses and…
pharyngula | April 19, 2006We biologists think we're all grody and cool with our dead mice, but then some smart-aleck chemist has to go trump us all with thermite explosions. That just isn't fair.
Just wait. Now some physicist is going to come along and make us all envious with his homebuilt laser.
Hold it! I just had a brilliant thought! If we got a physicist, a chemist, and a biologist together, we could make a laser-triggered thermite mouse trap. That would be waaaaaay better than a glue trap.
pharyngula | April 19, 2006It's a busy time for transitional fossil news—first they find a fishapod, and now we've got a Cretaceous snake with legs and a pelvis. One's in the process of gaining legs, the other is in the early stages of losing them.
Najash rionegrina was discovered in a terrestrial fossil deposit in Argentina, which is important in the ongoing debate about whether snakes evolved from marine or terrestrial ancestors. The specimen isn't entirely complete (but enough material is present to unambiguously identify it as a snake), consisting of a partial skull and a section of trunk. It has a sacrum! It has a…
pharyngula | April 19, 2006Spot is quoting Kevin Phillips and his new book, American Theocracy(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). He's describing the stagnation of scientific progress in the West when religion set its heavy hand on learning.
Symptom number two [referring to attributes regimes that become increasingly theocratic], related to the first, involves the interplay of faith and science. What might be called the Roman disenlightenment has been well dissected in Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind (2002). He dwells on how Rome's fourth- and fifth-century Christian regimes closed famous libraries like the one…
pharyngula | April 19, 2006
Forbes magazine asks
What if you could pick one thing and start over from scratch? What would you change? Would you choose another career, a different home, a new spouse? Or would you choose to remake the world around you? Why not fix America's prison system, make schools more efficient, or make your political leaders more intelligent?
The editors asked me to contribute to their special report, speculating on how we would "reinvent things without regard for cost, politics or practicality". I thought a little bigger than a new spouse or career, though, and instead tossed in few peculiar…
pharyngula | April 19, 2006Susie Madrak talks about killing mice—read it for the denouement. I'll share my first experience with killing mice, but I'll keep it below the fold for the squeamish.
I'd grown up familiar with mouse and rat traps, but it was my father who was in charge of setting them and taking out the little corpses. I didn't have to do any of that until I got to college, and then I did it on a massive scale.
I was a lackey in a lab looking at brain histology. That meant I got to collect the raw material, and my boss showed me the ropes.
"First, you catch the mouse. Then, you hold it near the edge of the…
pharyngula | April 18, 2006What is this phenomenon called "Science Blogging"? And when are you going to start?
pharyngula | April 18, 2006Zenoferox has dug up a review of Crichton's Andromeda Strain from 1969—Alexei Panshin tore into him for his bad science even then. I remember seeing the movie in junior high school myself, and feeling ripped off by the incredibly flaccid ending.
pharyngula | April 18, 2006The relative length of bat forelimb digits has not changed in 50
million years. (a) Icaronycteris index, which is a 50-million-year-old bat fossil. (b) Extant adult
bat skeleton. The metacarpals (red arrows) of the first fossil bats are already
elongated and closely resemble modern bats. This observation is confirmed by
morphometric analysis of bat forelimb skeletal elements.
or•gan•ic | ôr'ganik | adjective. denoting a relation between elements of something such that they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole; characterized by continuous or natural development.
One of the…
pharyngula | April 18, 2006
It always gives a fellow a warm feeling to see an old comrade-in-arms publish a good paper. Chris Cretekos was a graduate student working on the molecular genetics of zebrafish at the University of Utah when I was a post-doc there, and he's a good guy I remember well…so I was glad to see his paper in Developmental Dynamics. But then I notice it wasn't on zebrafish—Apostate! Heretic!
Except…it's on bats. How cool is that? And it's on the embryonic development of bats. Even cooler! I must graciously forgive his defection from the zebrafish universe since he is working on an organism that is…
evolgen | April 18, 2006Read this article. It deals with scientific literacy, politics, and religion in the United States, focusing on stem cells and evolution. Here's a taste:
To measure public acceptance of the concept of evolution, Miller has been asking adults if "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals" since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word "evolution" in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory.
To find out what I think about rephrasing the question and substituting "develop" for "evolve…
pharyngula | April 17, 2006No, really, it's hard to believe, but it's true. See Richard Feynman interviewed, for example.
pharyngula | April 17, 2006Once again, I bravely plunge into the fascinating world of kinky sex research in humans. This time, we learn something incredibly useful. Gentleman, would you like to know how to improve the potency of your semen? Do you need a good excuse to give your significant other when she catches you browsing porn sites? Do you want another excuse to sneer at those pompous business types who flaunt their fancy cell phones? Here's the study for you.
There's a vested interest in bettering male sperm quality at fertility clinics, obviously. There are multiple ways to measure the potency of a semen sample…
pharyngula | April 17, 2006By way of Over My Med Body, I found this article that finds new virtues for seafood: it reduces anti-social behavior. This is great news! I plan to announce when I'm feeling cranky here at the Myers household, which will prompt an immediate serving of tasty salmon. I'm going to be eating fish every day!
Well, maybe not…I'm really not that cranky. But it is yet another piece touting the virtues of polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially the essential ω-3 fatty acids in which sea food is rich, so it reinforces my preferences, anyway.
Dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids do have a record of…
pharyngula | April 17, 2006Here's an interactive timeline that has it all: animated critters go strolling across the screen, there is a graph of oxygen concentration, and you can watch the continents slip and slide around the globe as you drag an arrow around the timeline. You'll want a big monitor to display this on—it gets cluttered at times.
pharyngula | April 15, 2006Word is just in from a fellow doing some interesting work that the Royal Society lecture by Steve Jones, "Why Creationism is wrong and Evolution is right" is available for your viewing pleasure.
evolgen | April 15, 2006From the London Times:
In a series of Good Friday meditations that he will lead in Rome, the Pope will say that society is in the grip of a kind of "anti-Genesis" described as "a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family". He will pray for society to be cleansed of the "filth" that surrounds it and be restored to purity, freed from "decadent narcissism".
Yo, bro, if you want to free society from "decadent narcissism" you could start by moving out of that huge mansion. I've been there. The place is awesome, but the dresses, funny hats, and some sort of special connection to God sure…