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Origins and evolution of pathogensEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
An article in PLoS Pathogens by Morris et al describe a hypothesis about the evolution and origins of plant pathogens applying the parallel theories to the emergence of medically relevant pathogens. The authors highlight the importance of understanding the evolution of organisms in the context of emerging pathogens like Puccinia Ug99 for our ability to design strategies to protect human health and food supplies. Both bacterial and fungal pathogens of plants are discussed but I (perhaps unsurprisingly) focus on the fungi here. The authors suggest that theories on the emergence of diseases proposed in medical epidemiology...
Source: Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics - February 8, 2010 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Authors: Jason Stajich Tags: animal pathogen evolution fungi human pathogen microbe plant pathogen cryptococcus hypotheses intracellular Source Type: blogs

Charles Darwin was a genius (I think)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
After watching Creation last week I decided to take the plunge and read Origin of Species. As I've mentioned before I did read Origin early in my teen years, but in hindsight with minimal comprehension. Since then I've occasionally started to read Origin, or perused an extract, but I've never made it from front to back as a sentient adult. At this point I'm 3/4 of the way through, and I need to get something off my chest: I now believe that Charles Darwin was a very smart man, a genius. I had heard other people to refer to Darwin in such a fashion, but reading his original works has brought home to me much more viscerally ...
Source: Gene Expression - February 8, 2010 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Carnival of Evolution #20! is out and it's got some good stuff ...Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Just a quick post here to suggest people check out the Carnival of Evolution (#20) being hosted at Skeptic Wonder (see Skeptic Wonder: Carnival of Evolution #20!). It's has some juicy evolution posts discussed and (perhaps) best of all has a "phylogenetic" tree based on the postings. I recommend everyone check it out ... -------- This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter. -------- (Source: The Tree of Life)
Source: The Tree of Life - February 4, 2010 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: evolution Source Type: blogs

Story behind the science: #PLoS Genetics "Evolutionary mirages" paperEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Conclusions: Lynch has eloquently argued that biologists are often too quick to assume that organismal and genomic complexity must arise from selection for complex structures and too slow to adopt non-adaptive hypotheses. Our results lend additional support to this view, and extend it to show that indirect and non-adaptive forces can not only produce structure, but also create an illusion that this structure is being conserved. We do not doubt that many aspects of transcriptional regulation constrain the location of transcription factor binding sites within enhancers. Indeed a large body of experimental evidence supports t...
Source: The Tree of Life - February 3, 2010 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: story behind the paper evolution Adaptationism genomics Source Type: blogs

The evolutionary underpinnings of metastasis: a non geneticist viewEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Metastasis, the spread of a tumour from a primary site to secondary ones, is the reason cancers become life threatening. Metastasis requires tumour cells to acquire a number of capabilities, mainly the capacity to get into the bloodstream (or any other system that would allow the cells to reach other parts of the organism like the lymphatic system, or the bones), the capacity to get out of it and finally the capacity to grow and prosper in the new location. Interestingly, not all these capabilities are beneficial from the evolutionary view point. A tumour cell in a primary site that gets in a blood vessel is unlikely to be...
Source: Cancerevo: Evolution and cancer - February 3, 2010 Category: Cancer Authors: David Basanta Tags: cancer evolution self-metastasis larry norton selection Source Type: blogs

Evolution of PlastidsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Photosynthesis is one of the most successful energy production strategies on the planet and has been co-opted numerous times throughout evolutionary history via the uptake and retention of photosynthetic cells by non-photosynthetic eukaryotic heterotrophs. Whereas the result of this process is clear, what is not settled is the mode and tempo of plastid movement among eukaryotes, particularly plastids of red algal derivation. Recent changes in our understanding of the relationships between eukaryotic supergroups have only served to complicate the picture further. Of particular interest is the evolution of plastids, the rela...
Source: Microbiology Blog: The weblog for microbiologists. - February 2, 2010 Category: Microbiology Tags: Plastid Photosynthesis Evolution of plastids Evolutionary history Endosymbiogenesis Source Type: blogs

The Evolution of EmpathyEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Editor’s Note: we are pleased to bring you this article thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine). The Evolution of Empathy Empathy’s not a uniquely human trait, explains primatologist Frans de Waal. Apes and other animals feel it as well, suggesting that empathy is truly an essential part of who we are. Once upon a time, the United States had a president known for a peculiar facial display. In an act of controlled emotion, he would bite his lower lip and tell his audience, “I feel your pain.” Whether the display was sincere is not the issue here; how we are affected by another’s pr...
Source: SharpBrains - February 2, 2010 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greater Good Magazine Tags: Author Speaks Series Education & Lifelong Learning Biology brain Carolyn Zahn-Waxler Emotions empathy evolution Frans de Waal heart human Jules Masserman morality primate primatologist Psychology Source Type: blogs

Darwin wuz wrong, part nEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A review of a new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Co-authored by Jerry Fodor, who has been continuing his war against natural selection. I've already read Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (at the suggestion of a reader who found the arguments within incredibly persuasive, convincing me to simply ignore anything that reader ever asserted after finishing the book), so I think I have my quota of philosopher-declaring-evolution-the-naked-emperor under my belt. Meanwhile, there are real scholars grappling with the issues which emerged in the wake of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis ...
Source: Gene Expression - January 29, 2010 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

The Evolutionary Situation of BehaviorEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Thomas Brennan and Andrew Lo recently published their interesting paper, titled “The Origin of Behavior,” on SSRN. Here’s the abstract. * * * We propose a single evolutionary explanation for the origin of several behaviors that have been observed in organisms ranging from ants to human subjects, including risk-sensitive foraging, risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, randomization, and diversification. Given an initial population of individuals, each assigned a purely arbitrary behavior with respect to a binary choice problem, and assuming that offspring behave identically to their paren...
Source: The Situationist - January 28, 2010 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Abstracts Behavioral Economics Behavioral Finance evolution loss aversion Probability Matching Risk Aversion Risk Preferences Source Type: blogs

The last Iberian NeandertalEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Conclusions/Significance These findings have implications for the understanding of the emergence of anatomical modernity in the Old World as a whole, support explanations of the archaic features of the Lagar Velho child's anatomy that invoke evolutionarily significant Neandertal/modern admixture at the time of contact, and counter suggestions that Neandertals could have survived in southwest Iberia until as late as the Last Glacial Maximum. The paper is pretty long, and probably as opaque to most readers who are as unfamiliar as I with the nuts & bolts of physical anthropology, so ScienceDaily is worth reading: These find...
Source: Gene Expression - January 27, 2010 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

the beginning of the misdiagnosis discussion : it was not childhood bipolar in 1999 and it still isn't, a decade long journey part one: a rambleEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: soulful sepulcher)
Source: soulful sepulcher - January 24, 2010 Category: Mental Illness Tags: 1999- 2008: OCD: ADHD: Childhood Bipolar Disorder: The Evolution of a Diagnosis 1999- 2007: OCD: ADHD: Childhood Bipolar Disorder: The Evolution of a Diagnosis Source Type: blogs

Neurospora 2010 and upcoming fungal conferencesEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Don’t forget to register for Neurospora 2010 held at the beautiful Asilomar Conference center in Pacific Grove, CA held April 8-11, 2010. Get your filamentous fungi fix here! Also save the date for some other important upcoming conferences you may consider attending American Society of Microbiology, Candida and Dimorphic Fungi Meeting, March 22-26, Miami, FL, USA Joint Genome Institute, 2010 User Meeting, March 24-26, Walnut Creek, CA, USA New and emerging fungal diseases of animals and plants, April 17-21, Roscoff Biological Station (near Brest), Brittany, FRANCE American Society of Microbiology, 110th Annual Meeti...
Source: Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics - January 22, 2010 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Authors: Jason Stajich Tags: Mycological Society of America Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution conferences & courses asilomar fungi IMC9 neurospora Source Type: blogs

Confronting Intelligent Design arguments directly in the scientific literatureEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A representative from Wiley publishing sent me a link to an interesting new paper. Entitled "Using Protistan Examples to Dispel the Myths of Intelligent Design" by Mark Farmer, from the University of Georgia and Andrea Habura, from the University at Albany, New York. It is from the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology and is based upon a presentation they gave at a workshop at a conference. Basically, the article is a detailed discussion of how examples relating to microbial eukaryotes (I hate the term protist ...) that are used by Intelligent Design advocates are, well, BS. And the article discusses the eviden...
Source: The Tree of Life - January 20, 2010 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: research blogging microbiology evolution Source Type: blogs

Y Chromosome Still EvolvingEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Some have theorized that the Y chromosome is in decline, that the chromosome that makes men into men is losing out in the rush of evolution. But no. I'm sure many guys will be happy to know that the Y chromosome is evolving under heavy evolutionary pressure. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (January 13, 2010) Contrary to a widely held scientific theory that the mammalian Y chromosome is slowly decaying or stagnating, new evidence suggests that in fact the Y is actually evolving quite rapidly through continuous, wholesale renovation. By conducting the first comprehensive interspecies comparison of Y chromosomes, Whitehead Institute rese...
Source: FuturePundit - January 13, 2010 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Tags: Trends, Human Evolution Source Type: blogs

The Funniest Thing I have Read TodayEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
While reading through comments on a topic I found in a group on Facebook, I came across this:"People fortunately became educated enough to refute the theory of evolution which was constantly imposed on ordinary masses. Gravity is felt that's why it is believed where as evolution is not even felt. Evolution is a great deception of Satan which is not a new theory propsed by Master Mason - Darwin rather it belongs to Ancient Egyptians and other Pagan dogmas.-Majid Khan"Thought I'd share it with you.Thanks for reading :) ... http://prep4md.blogspot.com/ (Source: My M.D. Journey!)
Source: My M.D. Journey! - January 7, 2010 Category: Medical Students Tags: Facebook Evolution Medical Myth Buster Source Type: blogs

Story behind the science: #PLoS Biology paper on cichlid vision evolutionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study was a long time in the making. We started studying the visual system of cichlids in the 1990’s. We learned quickly that there was a lot of variation in opsin expression within the Lake Malawi species. However, we had only examined a few species. In 2005, Tom Cronin and Justin Marshall (world experts on aquatic visual systems) agree to come to Lake Malawi with us and help examine a greater number of species. Justin brought his underwater spectrometer and characterized the light environment. Tom and I measured fish colors (that paper is under review) and I extracted retina for...
Source: The Tree of Life - January 5, 2010 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: story behind the paper plos evolution Source Type: blogs

Primitive man had "Neandertal teeth"Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Dental maturational sequence and dental tissue proportions in the early Upper Paleolithic child from Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal: Neandertals differ from recent and terminal Pleistocene human populations in their patterns of dental development, endostructural (internal structure) organization, and relative tissue proportions. Although significant changes in craniofacial and postcranial morphology have been found between the Middle Paleolithic and earlier Upper Paleolithic modern humans of western Eurasia and the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene inhabitants of the same region, most studies of dental maturation and stru...
Source: Gene Expression - January 5, 2010 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

You may think you're African-American, but...Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
An NSF post on Twitter this morning described an interesting study from the University of Pennsylanvia and Cornell University, that found that some people who call themselves "African Americans" may only be 1% West African, according to their DNA. The University of Pennsylvania press release contains other interesting findings as well. 365 individuals were studied and 300,000 genetic markers were examined. Some of the findings were: If you're African American, the genes most likely to have an African origin are those on your X chromosome. The article didn't mention it, but I would guess that also be true of your mitoc...
Source: Discovering Biology in a Digital World - January 4, 2010 Category: Medical Scientists Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Stitching different web tools to organize a projectEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A little over a year ago I mentioned a project I was working on about prediction and evolution of E3 ligase targets (aka P1). As I said back then, I am free to risk as much as I want in sharing ongoing results and Nir London just asked me how the project is going via the comments of that blog post so I decided to give a bit of an update. Essentially, the project quickly deviated from course since I realized that predicting E3 specificity and experimentally determining ubiquitylation sites in fungal species (without having to resort to strain manipulation) were not going to be an easy tasks. So, since the goal was to ...
Source: Public Rambling - January 3, 2010 Category: Bioinformaticians Tags: evolution phosphorylation open science P1 Source Type: blogs

PRDM9 and the evolution of recombination hotspotsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This week in Science, three papers report that the product of the gene PRDM9 is an important determinant of where recombination occurs in the genome during meiosis. Though this may sound like something of an esoteric discovery, it's actually pretty remarkable, and brings together a number of lines of research in evolutionary genetics. How so?A bit of background.A few somewhat related facts:1. A major goal in the study of speciation is the identification of the genes that underlie reproductive barriers between species. In 2008, the first such gene in mammals was found--in a cross between two subspecies of mouse where the ma...
Source: Gene Expression - January 2, 2010 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Genetics Source Type: blogs

The year of Darwin in Cancerevo reviewedEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The year of Darwin is over and I decided to go over some posts in this blog that I felt were particularly Darwinian (not a small feat as the main topic of this blog is evolution in the context of cancer). The posts highlight (or at least that would be my hope) the importance of understanding that tumours evolve, that evolutionary dynamics make cancer a very difficult disease to treat, that ignoring these dynamics is one of the reasons for the limited success in the fight against cancer and that evolutionary enlightened (as a colleague at Moffitt likes to refer to them) treatments are our best hope for a cure. Some of these...
Source: Cancerevo: Evolution and cancer - January 1, 2010 Category: Cancer Authors: David Basanta Tags: evolution darwin cancer medicine year Source Type: blogs

Barcoding, taxonomy and citizen CSIEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
I just love the continued coverage of the story of the students from Trinity School in New York (a high school) who do investigative DNA barcoding projects. (There is a good new story about this on the LA Times blogs at:Think that sheep's mik cheese comes from a sheep? DNA doesn't lie | Booster Shots | Los Angeles Times) In the most recent example, two students, Brenda Tan and Matt Cost, did some home barcoding in collaboration with people from the AMNH and Rockefeller University. Among their findings: "an invasive species of insect in a box of grapefruit from Texas" "what could be a new species or subspecies of New Yo...
Source: The Tree of Life - January 1, 2010 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: education citizen science barcoding systematics evolution Source Type: blogs

Predictions for 2010Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
By David BoazI was just listening to the December CatoAudio interview with Tom Palmer and Ian Vasquez about the fall of the Soviet empire 20 years ago, and Tom mentioned that even as late as October 7, 1989, when the East German government held a gala celebration of its 40th year in power, no one anticipated that within a month the Wall would open and communism would come to an abrupt end in eastern Europe. And then I looked at the predictions of various scholars and pundits at Politico’s Arena one year ago today and noticed how wrong most of them were — Terry McAuliffe would be elected governor of Virginia, Ro...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 31, 2009 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: David Boaz Tags: General evolution Financial interest rates Justice Stevens Palmer wall street Wall Street Journal Source Type: blogs

What Darwin Never Knew (online)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
If you missed it, you can still watch it online. Read the comments on this post... (Source: Gene Expression)
Source: Gene Expression - December 31, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

More coverage of the GEBA "Phylogeny Driven Genomic Encyclopedia"Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Just a quick note here to post some links to additional stories about my new paper on "A phylogeny driven genomic encyclopedia of bacteria and archaea" which was published last week in Nature. Carl Zimmer has an article today in the New York Times "Scientists Start a Genomic Catalog of Earth’s Abundant Microbes" about the paper and the project. In the article he interviews me and Hans-Peter Klenk, who was a co-author and led the culturing part of the project. A few things to note about this: It is rare to have archaea mentioned in the New York Times. There is a tree that goes along with the article wh...
Source: The Tree of Life - December 29, 2009 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: phylogeny archaea evolution GEBA Source Type: blogs

Story behind the story for new #PLoSOne paper on Bayesian phylogeneticsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
There is an interesting new paper in PLoS One" Long-Branch Attraction Bias and Inconsistency in Bayesian Phylogenetics" by Brian Kolaczkowski and Joseph Thornton. The work focuses on methods for inferring phylogenetic history and in particular two types of statistical approaches: Likelihood and Bayesian. These methods are related to each other in that both attempt to use statistical models of evolution and then test different possible phylogenetic trees related taxa by how well certain data sets about those taxa map into the different possible trees. What they did in this new paper was test, with some simu...
Source: The Tree of Life - December 22, 2009 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: phylogenetics evolution behind the research Source Type: blogs

Wired for justice?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Since my last post was rather pessimistic, I thought I'd point to something a little more cheerful, Social Scientists Build Case for 'Survival of the Kindest': Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive. In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkel...
Source: Gene Expression - December 18, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Shellfish & the human bottleneckEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
How shellfish saved the human race:Turns out, somewhere between 130,000 to 190,000 years ago, the human species was reduced to less than 1000 breeding individuals--just a few thousand people in total. Ancient, naturally driven climate change pushed our species to the brink, said Curtis Marean, Ph.D., a professor with the Institute of Human Origins and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.What saved us? According to Marean, the answer may be "shellfish"."They're a great source of protein," he said. "And shellfish are immune to colder ocean temperatures. In fact, when the water gets col...
Source: Gene Expression - December 17, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Human Evolution Source Type: blogs

Nice Darwin Art at #UCDavis Evolution/Ecology Dept.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
For more on this see The Face of Darwin where K. Garvey explains the history of the mural in more detail. -------- This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter. -------- (Source: The Tree of Life)
Source: The Tree of Life - December 13, 2009 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: Charles Darwin Davis evolution science and art Source Type: blogs

Nice Darwin Art at #UCDavis Evolution/Ecology Dept.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
For more on this see The Face of Darwin where K. Garvey explains the history of the mural in more detail. -------- This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter. -------- (Source: The Tree of Life)
Source: The Tree of Life - December 13, 2009 Category: Medical Scientists Tags: Charles Darwin Davis evolution science and art Source Type: blogs

The Situation of KindnessEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Yamin Anwar wrote an interesting press release about recent and ongoing research at University of California, Berkeley suggesting that the kindest, and not just the fittest, survive. Here are some excerpts. * * * Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive. In contrast to “every man for himself” interpretations of Charles DarwinR...
Source: The Situationist - December 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Life positive psychology evolution evolutionary psychology Source Type: blogs

The downside of beautyEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Well, I don't quite know about that, but that's the sort of take-away from a new paper in PLoS Biology which looks at the downsides of female attractiveness. A Cost of Sexual Attractiveness to High-Fitness Females: Adaptive mate choice by females is an important component of sexual selection in many species. The evolutionary consequences of male mate preferences, however, have received relatively little study, especially in the context of sexual conflict, where males often harm their mates. Here, we describe a new and counterintuitive cost of sexual selection in species with both male mate preference and sexual conflict vi...
Source: Gene Expression - December 8, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Amazing post-doc fellowship opportunity: Center for population biology at #UCDavisEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
No bias here --- but this really is an incredible post doc opportunity in population biology here at U. C. Davis. See below: EFFECTIVE: December 7, 2009 DEADLINE: January 20, 2010 POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW IN POPULATION BIOLOGY--The Center for Population Biology at UC Davis invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Population Biology, broadly defined to include ecology, phylogenetics, comparative biology, population genetics, and evolution. We particularly encourage applications from candidates that have recently completed, or will soon complete, their PhD. The position is for TWO YEARS, subject to rev...
Source: The Tree of Life - December 7, 2009 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: Davis evolution Source Type: blogs

Amazing post-doc fellowship opportunity: Center for population biology at #UCDavisEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
No bias here --- but this really is an incredible post doc opportunity in population biology here at U. C. Davis. See below:EFFECTIVE: December 7, 2009DEADLINE: January 20, 2010POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW IN POPULATION BIOLOGY--The Center for Population Biology at UC Davis invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Population Biology, broadly defined to include ecology, phylogenetics, comparative biology, population genetics, and evolution. We particularly encourage applications from candidates that have recently completed, or will soon complete, their PhD. The position is for TWO YEARS, subject to review afte...
Source: The Tree of Life - December 7, 2009 Category: Medical Scientists Tags: Davis evolution Source Type: blogs

Those humanitarian founders!Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Darwin's idea has cost lives: Truths that America's founding fathers had held to be self-evident - that all men were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights - were now scorned as gross sentimentalities that had been overtaken by Darwinian science. Within a decade the self-styled "scientific racialists" had begun to classify other groups as genetically inferior. Immigrants from Spain and Italy were held to be a threat to the quality of the American gene pool and spurious scientific evidence was adduced to "prove" that Jewish immigrants were near-imbeciles whose admission in large numbers might lead to a lo...
Source: Gene Expression - December 5, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

BioLogosEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Discovered an interesting new blog site today on the topic of science and religion – Science and the Sacred from the BioLogos Foundation. It features a number of well-respected authors in this field and the general gist is to attempt to reconcile the findings of science (particularly biological) with the disciplines of theology and biblical studies to construct a more integrated worldview on issues of creation and science. Too often this discussion is polarized and driven by extremists like the militant atheist Richard Dawkins on one side and fundamentalist whackos like Ken Ham on the other side. Belief in God and be...
Source: Baggas' Blog - December 2, 2009 Category: Family Physicians Authors: baggas Tags: Christianity Religion Science creation evolution Source Type: blogs

Humans are naughty & nice by natureEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We May Be Born With an Urge to Help: What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents. But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to ...
Source: Gene Expression - December 1, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Climate & the Out of Africa migration(s)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Wet phases in the Sahara/Sahel region and human migration patterns in North Africa: The carbon isotopic composition of individual plant leaf waxes (a proxy for C3 vs. C4 vegetation) in a marine sediment core collected from beneath the plume of Sahara-derived dust in northwest Africa reveals three periods during the past 192,000 years when the central Sahara/Sahel contained C3 plants (likely trees), indicating substantially wetter conditions than at present. Our data suggest that variability in the strength of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a main control on vegetation distribution in central North Af...
Source: Gene Expression - November 30, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Abortion Does Not Change Brain Evolutionary Pressures?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Ron Guhname (not his real name), The Inductivist, used data from the General Social Survey to look at the question of whether the legalization of abortion in America caused a change in selective pressures for intelligence. Using the GSS Wordsum test as a rough measure of intelligence Ron finds that abortion did not appear to change the selective pressures for higher or lower intelligence. The selective pressures for lower intelligence continued unchanged. The first year of the General Social Survey was 1972. I looked at white women ages 50 and over for all surveys conducted in the 70s. The mean number of kids for dull wome...
Source: FuturePundit - November 30, 2009 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Tags: Brain Evolution Source Type: blogs

Why whales get no biggerEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Carl Zimmer reports that it might be a function of physics. Bigger whales have proportionality bigger mouths, but at some point the biological engineering runs up against constraints:s they report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Goldbogen and his colleagues found that big fin whales are not just scaled-up versions of little fin whales. Instead, as their bodies get bigger, their mouths get much bigger. Small fin whales can swallow up about 90% of their own body weight. Very big ones can gulp 160%. In other words, big fin whales need more and more energy to handle the bigger slugs of water they gulp. As their ...
Source: Gene Expression - November 25, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Genetics Population genetics Source Type: blogs

My favorite evolution stuff 2. Charles Darwin Tobacco CardEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In honor of Charlie D. I am posting one of my favorite Darwin items. I got this from Ebay years ago. It is a Darwin card - about 3 x 5 cm. From Ogden's Cigarettes, much like baseball cards. Also see my previous "Favorite Darwin thing" - a post card from 1900 or so. -------- This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter. -------- (Source: The Tree of Life)
Source: The Tree of Life - November 24, 2009 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Tags: Charles Darwin evolution Source Type: blogs

My favorite evolution stuff 2. Charles Darwin Tobacco CardEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In honor of Charlie D. I am posting one of my favorite Darwin items. I got this from Ebay years ago. It is a Darwin card - about 3 x 5 cm. From Ogden's Cigarettes, much like baseball cards. Also see my previous "Favorite Darwin thing" - a post card from 1900 or so. -------- This is from the "Tree of Life Blog" of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter. -------- (Source: The Tree of Life)
Source: The Tree of Life - November 24, 2009 Category: Medical Scientists Tags: Charles Darwin evolution Source Type: blogs

The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It EnduresEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been published, The Dawkins' Delusion being a typical example. More recently more nuanced books which wend the middle ground between militant atheism and conventional apologetics have taken center strage. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God approaches this from a philo-theistic angle, while Robert Wright's The Evolution of God is predicate...
Source: Gene Expression - November 19, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Ancient DNA & the moaEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The evolutionary history of the extinct ratite moa and New Zealand Neogene paleogeography: ...We synthesize mitochondrial phylogenetic information from 263 subfossil moa specimens from across NZ with morphological, ecological, and new geological data to create the first comprehensive phylogeny, taxonomy, and evolutionary timeframe for all of the species of an extinct order. We also present an important new geological/paleogeographical model of late Cenozoic NZ, which suggests that terrestrial biota on the North and South Island landmasses were isolated for most of the past 20-30 Ma. The data reveal that the patterns of gen...
Source: Gene Expression - November 19, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Celebrate Darwin's 200th birthdayEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
NESCent and SCONC: What: November SCONC-fest When: Thursday November 19th , 6-8pm Where: National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham Please join us to commemorate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of "The Origin of Species." Learn about the wild world of Ice Age carnivores, brainy birds, and other creatures Darwin missed. Our tour guides will be four postdocs on the frontiers of biology. We'll begin at 6pm at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham. Parking is free. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) 2024 W. Main Street, Suite A200 Durham, NC 27705 Map: http:/...
Source: A Blog Around The Clock - November 18, 2009 Category: Medical Publishers Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

FOXP2 in NatureEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2:...It has been proposed that the amino acid composition in the human variant of FOXP2 has undergone accelerated evolution, and this two-amino-acid change occurred around the time of language emergence in humans...However, this remains controversial, and whether the acquisition of these amino acids in human FOXP2 has any functional consequence in human neurons remains untested. Here we demonstrate that these two human-specific amino acids alter FOXP2 function by conferring differential transcriptional regulation in vitro. We extend these observation...
Source: Gene Expression - November 11, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Language Human Evolution FOXP2 Source Type: blogs

Levels of selection & the full Price EquationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In the post below on the Price Equation I stayed true to George Price's original notation in his 1970 paper where he introduced his formalism. But here is a more conventional form, the "Full Price Equation," which introduces a second element on the right-side. Δz = Cov(w, z) / w + E(wΔz) / w One can specifically reformulate this verbally for a biological context: Change in trait = Change due to selection on individuals + Change due to individual transmission The first element on the right-side is explicable as selection upon a heritable trait. w is the conventional letter used for "fitness," so w is populat...
Source: Gene Expression - November 11, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

The intersection of public policy, economics, & evolutionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Next Monday at NESCent: When: Monday November 16, 2009, 10-11:30am Where: NESCent, 2024 W. Main St., Durham, NC 27705, Erwin Mill Bldg, Suite A103 Directions: http://www.nescent.org/about/directions.php What do public policy and economics have to do with evolutionary theory? A lot, say participants in an upcoming meeting at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, NC. Nearly 30 scholars, policymakers, and entrepreneurs from both the academic and the business worlds will gather at the NESCent headquarters November 13-16, 2009. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss how evolutionary theory can c...
Source: A Blog Around The Clock - November 10, 2009 Category: Medical Publishers Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

The Price EquationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In the comments below I referred to the "Price Equation." Here is what William D. Hamilton had to say about George Price's formalism in Narrow Roads of Gene Land: A manuscript did eventually come from him but what I found set out was not any sort of new derivation or correction of my 'kin selection' but rather a strange new formalism that was applicable to every kind of natural selection. Central to Price's approach was a covariance formula the like of which I had never seen...Price had not like the rest of us looked up the work of the pioneers when he first became interested in selection; instead he had worked out everyth...
Source: Gene Expression - November 10, 2009 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Evolution Source Type: blogs

Microbial SystematicsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The higher taxonomic groups within prokaryotes are presently distinguished mainly on the basis of their branching in phylogenetic trees. In most cases, no molecular, biochemical or physiological characteristics are known that are uniquely shared by species from these groups. Analyses of genome sequences are leading to discovery of novel molecular characteristics that are specific for different groups of bacteria and archaea and provide more precise means for identifying and circumscribing these groups of microbes in clear molecular terms and for understanding their evolution (Xu, 2010).References:Xu, J. (2010) Microbial Po...
Source: Microbiology Blog: The weblog for microbiologists. - November 3, 2009 Category: Microbiology Tags: Phylogenetic trees Microbial evolution Source Type: blogs