Can Science and Religion Get Along?
at 9:32 am on Tuesday, 8 March 2011
“WASHINGTON, D.C.—Can pastoral warnings of fire and brimstone be redirected toward a heating planet in the interest of preserving God’s creation? Or are those who build creation museums hopeless ideologues whose Stone Age ideas should be buried once and for all?
“Those were among the topics of discussion at a seminar here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . . .”
So opened an online Science NOW article of 19 February 2011.
read the article
Biological Diversity Correlates with Ecological Opportunity: Surprised?
at 9:28 am on Thursday, 26 August 2010
Jerry Coyne, on his Why Evolution is True site has a quick analysis of a new paper that is turning up all over the place under a headline that is some variant of Darwin Was Wrong, when it fact, the article doesn’t seem to prove anything of the kind.
Read a reasonable and rational review at Why Evolution is True.
Suminia: Life in the Trees 260 Million Years Ago
(Laelaps, May 28, 2010)
When I hear the phrase “early human relative” I cannot help but think of an ape-like creature. Something like Sahelanthropus fits the bill nicely – it may not be a hominin but it is still a close relative from around the time that the first hominins evolved. That is why I was a bit puzzled to see MSNBC.com parroting a story written by the Discovery Channel which proclaimed “Early human relative predates even dinosaurs”! Was this another fossil that would change everything? While not quite as startling as a Precambrian rabbit, a 260-million-year-old-hominin (or even primate) would certainly be a shocker!
The truth of the matter, however, is that the fossil described in the MSNBC story is only a distant relative of humans. Called Suminia getmanovi, it was a synapsid (the diverse group of vertebrates to which mammals and their closest relatives belong) that lived during the Permian in what is now Russia. More specifically, it was an anomodont, or a relative of the tubby Lystrosaurus and the small, tusked Robertia. The attempt to make Suminia relevant to human ancestry, therefore, was a quick and dirty way of grabbing attention, but in this case I think it stirred more confusion than enlightenment.
Read the rest of this entry here:
Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years
at 8:50 am on Tuesday, 25 May 2010
It is now growing season across the Corn Belt of the United States. Seeds that have just been sown will, with the right mixture of sunshine and rain, be knee-high plants by the Fourth of July and tall stalks with ears ripe for picking by late August.
Corn is much more than great summer picnic food, however. Civilization owes much to this plant, and to the early people who first cultivated it.
(New York Times, May 25, 2010)
Read the rest of this entry here.
I, microbe: Sequencing the bugs in our bodies
20 May 2010 by Caitlin Stier
People are more microbe than human, with microbes outnumbering our cellsby 10 to 1. But strangely, scientists know more about the microbes that inhabit the soil and sea than those that call us home. Now, the genetic sequencing of 178 of these microbes will help close that gap.
Scientists have long known that our microbial inhabitants, collectively known as the microbiome, can contribute to disease. But culturing the cells outside of the human body can be difficult, complicating efforts to identify many of them, particularly rare species.
Read the rest of this entry here.
Smallest waterlily in the world saved from extinction – by Kew Gardens
(guardian.co.uk, May 19, 2010)
The thermal waterlily, extinct in the wild since it disappeared from Rwanda in 2008, has been granted a new lease of life.
Plant experts at Kew Gardens have rescued the smallest waterlily in the world from the brink of extinction.
The thermal waterlily has not grown in the wild since the last specimens vanished two years ago from its only known habitat, a hot spring in southwest Rwanda.
After a year-long struggle, a Kew Gardens biologist worked out a way to grow the plants at the botanic gardens, paving the way for their reintroduction in the wild.
Read the rest of this entry here.
Ancient mass extinction of fish may have paved way for modern species
By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times
May 17, 2010 | 3:56 p.m.
A report looks at a 360-million-year-old gap in the fossil record and finds that marine vertebrates were recovering from an extinction event on par with the one that killed the dinosaurs. What happened is unclear.
Modern-day lizards, snakes, frogs and mammals — including us — may owe their existence to a mass extinction of ancient fish 360 million years ago that left the oceans relatively barren, providing room for marginal species that were our ancestors to thrive and diversify, paleontologists said Monday.
Read the rest of this entry here.
The majestic Megatherium
at 6:04 am on Tuesday, 18 May 2010
For over a century and a half dinosaurs have been the unofficial symbols and ambassadors of paleontology, but this was not always so. It was fossil mammals, not dinosaurs, which enthralled the public during the turn of the 19th century, and arguably the most famous was the enormous ground slothMegatherium. It was more than just a natural curiosity. The bones of the “great beast” represented a world which flourished and disappeared in the not-so-distant past, but, as illustrated by Christine Argot in a review of its history, illustrations of whatMegatherium looked like have been in flux since the time of its discovery.
No doubt humans have been finding the remains of giant ground sloths for quite some time, but the story of Megatherium as we know it began in 1788. It was in that year that Manuel Torres discovered the nearly complete skeleton of an immense, strange animal on the banks of the river Luján about 65 kilometers west of Buenos Aires in northern Argentina. . .
(Laelaps, May 18, 2010)
Read the rest of the entry here.
Giant oarfish caught off Sweden
at 9:29 am on Monday, 17 May 2010
. . . The giant oarfish, also known as “the king of herrings” (Regalecus glesne), is the world’s largest bony fish (“teleost”), and can grow up to 11 meters (36 feet) long! It’s rarely photographed because it lives in the deep sea, but one just washed up on the coast of Sweden, where it hasn’t been seen for 150 years. They eat plankton. Until today I didn’t know these creatures existed.
(Why Evolution is True, May 17, 2010)
Read the rest of the entry here.
How important is group selection?
at 8:04 am on Monday, 17 May 2010
The idea that selection operates on entire groups rather than individuals, and can lead to the evolution of group-level traits (altruism is supposed to be one of these), has been revived by several people. Among them are E. O. Wilson, but especially David Sloan Wilson, who has defended his notion of group selection in a fifteen-part (!) series on HuffPo, infelicitiously called “Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection.”. . .
Fortunately, you can get an excellent summary of the state of the field in a little over an hour, thanks to the London Evolutionary Research Network, a consortium of researchers who hold regular meetings and debates. Last July, they held a very nice debate, “Is natural selection at the group level an important evolutionary force?” which is now available at Vimeo.
(Why Evolution Is True, May 17, 2010)
Read the rest of the entry here.
Baby Coral Home In By Sound
How do baby coral find a new home in the open ocean? They listen – very closely—for reef sounds.
Scientists at the University of Bristol in England had already discovered in the last few years that baby fish who live among coral use sound to find the reefs. So they decided to check out the coral larvae themselves. These are tiny creatures, the size of a flea.
The researchers created so-called choice chambers. When the chambers were silent, the larvae floated about, equally distributed. But when the scientists played sounds of reefs, featuring the murmurs of fish and crustaceans, the larvae swarmed towards the speakers.
(Scientific American, May 17, 2010)
Read the rest of this entry here.
Modern life had a single origin
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/modern-life-had-a-single-origin/#comments
If you’ve been reading the evolution websites, you’ll know about the very nice paper in this week’s Nature by Douglas Theobald. (You may remember Theobald as the author of one of the greatest creationism-refuting websites of all: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent. If you haven’t seen it, you should). In the new paper, Theobald makes a few conservative assumptions to show that the probability that all living species descend from a universal common ancestor is infinitely higher than any other hypothesis, including those of multiple origins of the kingdoms (Bacteria, Eukarya, and Archaea) or of rampant horizontal gene transfer betweeen species that would, by mixing genomes, make life look as though it had a single origin when it didn’t.
(Why Evolution Is True, May 15, 2010)
Species extinctions happening before our eyes
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Species-extinctions-happening-before-our-eyes.html
In the past, research has predicted that global warming could lead to the extinction of more than one-fifth of animal and plant species. This research has largely been based on theoretical models. However, now observations can confirm whether reality matches theory. The paper Erosion of Lizard Diversity by Climate Change and Altered Thermal Niches (Sinervo 2010) compares global observations of lizard populations from 1975 to present day. The result? Rapidly warming temperatures are causing lizard species to go extinct before our eyes.
How does climate change affect lizard populations? While lizards bask in the morning sun to warm up, they retreat to the shade when temperatures get too hot to avoid heat stress. As it gets hotter, they have less time to forage for food. Warmer springs are particularly devastating as this is when lizards reproduce and need extra food.
(Skeptical Science, May 15, 2010)
The Proof Is in the Proteins: Test Supports Universal Common Ancestor for All Life
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=universal-common-ancestor&sc=WR_20100514
One researcher put the basic biological assumption of a single common ancestor to the test–and found that advanced genetic analysis and sophisticated statistics back up Darwin’s age-old proposition
Earth’s first life-form, floating in the proverbial froth of the primordial seas that eventually gave rise to trees, bees and humans, is not just a popular Darwinian conceit but also an essential biological premise that many researchers rely on as part of the foundation of their work.
In the 19th century, Charles Darwin went beyond others, who had proposed that there might be a common ancestor for all mammals or animals, and suggested that there was likely a common ancestor for all life on the planet—plant, animal and bacterial.
(Scientific American, May 13, 2010)
Archaeopteryx probably couldn’t fly
at 3:52 pm on Friday, 14 May 2010
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/archaeopteryx-probably-couldnt-fly/
. . .but maybe they could glide and parachute out of trees. If you’ve followed bird evolution, you know they evolved from theropod dinosaurs, and that feathers evolved before flight, probably for thermoregulation or sexual/species signalling. Some of the earliest “true” birds (and that’s a definition which is somewhat subjective), though, had feathers which were longer, superficially resembling those of modern birds. These creatures included the famous Archaeopteryx (which lived about 145 mya), and Confuciusornis (125 mya, the first bird with a toothless beak).
(WhyEvolutionIsTrue, May 14, 2010)
First birds were poor fliers – flaps would have buckled Archaeopteryx feathers
at 10:03 am on Friday, 14 May 2010
Meet Archaeopteryx, one of the most primitive of all birds. It beautifully illustrates the transition between small predatory dinosaurs and their bird descendants. It has toothed jaws and three clawed fingers on each hand, but it also had broad wings with well-developed flight feathers. Like those of modern birds, these feathers had two asymmetrical vanes coming off a central shaft or ‘rachis’.
But despite this striking resemblance, Archaeopteryx’s feathers differed from those of modern birds in a critical way. Robert Nudds from the University of Manchester and Gareth Dyke from University College Dublin have found that they were thinner and weaker than today’s feathers. If this early bird had tried the same flapping flight that its descendants do so effortlessly, its feathers would have buckled under the stress. It seems that this pioneer among birds wasn’t a very good flier.
(Discover, May 13, 2010)
Warming Imperils Lizards, Scientists Warn
Global warming is driving lizards in Mexico and across the globe toward extinction, according to a new study being published in the journal Science.
In an editorial accompanying the report, the scientists warn that climate-related “extinctions are not only in the future, but are happening now.”
Comparing populations of 48 Mexican lizard species at 200 sites with numbers collected in 1975, the scientists found that they had declined 12 percent.
(New York times: Green, May 14, 2010)
Whales evolved from small aquatic hoofed ancestors
at 9:23 am on Friday, 14 May 2010
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/
Travel back in time to about 50 million years ago and you might catch a glimpse of a small, unassuming animal walking on slender legs tipped with hooves, by the rivers of southern Asia. It feeds on land but when it picks up signs of danger, it readily takes to the water and wades to safety.
The animal is called Indohyus (literally “India’s pig”) and though it may not look like it, it is the earliest known relative of today’s whales and dolphins. Known mostly through a few fossil teeth, a more complete skeleton was described for the first time last week by Hans Thewissen and colleagues from the Northeastern Ohio Universities. It shows what the missing link between whales and their deer-like ancestors might have looked like and how it probably behaved.
(Not Exactly Rocket Science, May 8, 2010)
Cambrian survivors – weird critters which (temporarily) cheated extinction
When the Cambrian period comes up in conversation, it is usually in reference to the evolutionary “explosion” which occurred around 530 million years ago. Animal fossils from before that time are typically small or are only traces, but in the latter half of the period (spanning ~488 to 542 million years ago) there is a dramatic increase in the diversity and disparity of organisms. The “small shelly fauna” of earlier times is replaced by a riot of organisms interacting with each other in complex ecosystems – it is one of the most dramatic changes seen in the entire fossil record.
What is often forgotten, however, is that many of these weird critters disappeared by the end of the Cambrian in an extinction which appears to have swept away much of what had so recently (from a geological perspective) evolved.
That seemed like the best explanation, anyway, but there was one problem. We know of the existence of many strange Cambrian creatures because they have been recovered from sites of exceptional preservation which fossilized them with soft parts intact. Such sites are virtually unknown from the time right after the Cambrian, during the early days of the Ordovician period (~488-432 million years ago), making it difficult to know precisely when some of the extinct lineages disappeared. Now, as luck would have it, such an Ordovician site has been found in Morocco, and among the exceptionally-preserved fossils within it are creatures thought to have vanished millions of years before.
(Laelaps, May 13, 2010)
The Burgess Shale fauna was around a lot longer than we thought
We all know the Burgess Shale fauna from Steve Gould’s book Wonderful Life, which described it as a group of fantastic animals lacking any affinity with modern-day animals. Gould suggested that they went extinct without issue in the Cambrian, about 505 million years ago, but could easily have given rise to modern animals if the “tape of life” had been rewound.
Later work by Simon Conway Morris and others, of course, showed that the Burgess Shale fauna, although weird, did have affinities with modern groups like arthropods, lobopods (Onychophora) and annelids. Indeed, some of the fauna could have been ancestors of modern groups, although there still seem to be bizarre forms—called the “problematica”—without affinities to modern animals.
(Why Evolution Is True, May 13, 2010)
Creationism as postmodernism and Marxism
at 10:34 am on Thursday, 13 May 2010
Those who follow creationism carefully know that after it became clear that Intelligent design would fail in court, the new strategy which took the field often simply called for “critical analysis” of evolution. The practical effect is the same as when creationism is forced into the curriculum, but the phrasing is more pleasant to the ear. I was reminded of this in reading a generally insipid conversation between Margaret Wente (bolded) and Camille Paglia:
But in education today – even in primary-school education – all we hear about is “critical thinking.” All the facts are available on the Web, and everybody has a calculator. So why make kids memorize the times tables or the names of the biggest rivers in Canada?
(Thoughts from Kansas, May 11, 2010)
‘Megatheria’ muzzles provide clues to giant ground sloth diets
at 10:19 am on Thursday, 13 May 2010
http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2010/05/megatheria_muzzles_provides_cl.php
There is something fantastically weird about giant ground sloths. Creatures from a not-too-distant past, close enough in time that their hair and hide is sometimes found in circumstances of exceptional preservation, these creatures have no living equivalent. Their arboreal cousins still live in the tropics of the western hemisphere, but they can hardly be considered proxies for the ground sloths of the Pleistocene.
The most famous of these ancient beasts was Megatherium, an exceptionally large ground sloth which has been fascinating paleontologists and the public for over 200 years, but what is less well known by members of the public is that there were many kinds of ground sloth.Megatherium was not a lone aberration but a part of a highly successful family, one of the few types of weird South American mammal that flourished in North America when the two continents came into contact a few million years ago. Not all of them were the same. While some made their living grazing in open habitats others preferred to browse among most forested environs, and a recent study published in the Journal of Morphology provides a way to tell which kind of lifestyle particular sloths might have had.
(Laelaps, May 10, 2010)
Do religious Americans accept evolution?
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/religion-and-evolution/
Well, now I’ve seen it all. There are many ways that accommodationists try to show that faith and science are compatible, but never before have I seen a scientist with this aim play so fast and loose with the data. Dr. Joel Martin, the Curator of Crustacea and chief of the Division of Invertebrate Studies at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, has written an astonishing article in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach, “Compatibility of major U.S. Christian Denominations with Evolution”. (I can’t resist adding that besides his upcoming book, The Prism and the Rainbow: a Christian Explains Why Evolution is not a Threat, he also edited Crustacean Sexual Biology.)
(Why Evolution Is True, May 11, 2010)
UN report says planet falling short on goals to preserve more species
http://www.peavler.org/arguendo/wp-admin/post-new.php
Far too many of the world’s plants and animals — and the wild places that support them — are at risk of collapse, a U.N. report finds, despite a global goal set in 2002 for major improvement by this year.
Frogs and other amphibians are most at risk of extinction, coral reefs are the species deteriorating most rapidly and the survival of nearly a quarter of all plant species is threatened, the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity said Monday in a report issued every four years.
(LA Times, May 10, 2010)
O noes! Another species of human in Eurasia?
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/o-noes-another-species-of-human-in-eurasia/
The story of Homo keeps getting weirder and weirder. Just as I was getting used to the idea that Neandertals may have tossed the salad with more modern Homo sapiens, somebody calls my attention to yet anotherlineage of Homo that may have coexisted with both “modern” humans and Neandertals. This conclusion comes from DNA extracted from a single bone and described in a paper by Krause et al. (and, of course, Svante Pääbo) in the April 8 issue of Nature.
(Why Evolution Is True, May 13, 2010)