Evolution

The concept of altruism, a selfless concern for the welfare of others, a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core aspect of various religious traditions,  has long been debated in philosophical circles.  More recently, evolutionary biologists have joined the debate, saying that altruism may have evolved because any action that improves the likelihood of a relative's survival and reproduction increases the chance of an individual's DNA being passed on. Social behavior, kin recognition, and altruism are well known in the animal kingdom and plants have the ability to sense and…

In an earlier article titled What is Life?, I took the reader through a reasoning process to finally arrive at the conclusion that, contrary to general expectation, finding a definition of life is not an overwhelmingly difficult problem at all because life  is a remarkably simple concept – independent spontaneous cooperation.I think that finding a definition has been seen as difficult because those considering it have confused the definition with the underlying significance of life, which some might call life’s purpose, when the two are almost separate questions.This confusion, this…

This is a little old, but Thomas Mailund, who writes on of my favorite blogs, has posted a video interview with Svante Pääbo, the scientist leading the neanderthal genome project. At one point Pääbo addresses the question everyone's asking: did humans and neanderthals have sex? Pääbo says of course they did (why wouldn't they during the 10,000+ years they lived together), but the question is whether they produced hybrid offspring. He hopes to answer the latter question with the neanderthal genome sequence. Read the feed: This is a little old, but Thomas Mailund, who writes on of my favorite…

Welcome to the 17th edition of the Carnival of Evolution. This month, we celebrate not only great evolution blogging around the web, but also some of the best evolution writing of all time. 150 years ago, in November of 1859, The Origin of Species was published. For our sesquicentennial celebration of this major turning point in the history of biology, I've taken a virtual voyage on the Beagle through the vast expanse of the blogosphere. And like Darwin on that first trip in the Beagle, I've kept a journal of my observations, with a little posthumous help from Charles. The Virtual Voyage of…

In this article I am going to suggest that this arbitrary separation is meaningless.  Much like physics had to come to terms with wave-particle duality, biology must consider the same perspective where the answer depends very much on the question and how it is asked. Clearly genes are the agents of change, however the gene-centric view of natural selection has several problems, not the least of which is that the gene can't determine whether it is selected for.  In fact, an important question that needs to be asked, is what does it mean to have a greater representation in a…

A few days ago, I was working at home when the phone rang. I answered, and was surprised to hear a soft, accented voice asking for me. It was Lada Tsokolova, calling from Germany, with the sad news that her husband Sergey had just died of cancer.  I was stunned. Sergey was young! He had spent nearly a year in my lab in 2005-06, on a Fulbright Fellowship, and I had seen him recently at scientific meetings in Kyoto and Heidelberg, but he never mentioned that he was ill.     Sergey had a passionate interest in one of the great questions of biology: How can we define life?…

 Has evolution selected the best possible features for the species existing nowadays, or has it  done a second-hand job with whatever was available? We all have in mind that evolution from one species to the next has occurred thanks to a succession of small changes, creating, at the end of the day, big changes. One selected change represents a possible adaptation to the environment. But was each innovation optimal in terms of efficiency? The human machine, from a biological as well as a psychological point of view, can appear improbably complex, reaching perhaps perfection, which…

Two letters to Nature today burst into data about a gamma-ray burst, GRB 090423. The first is A -ray burst at a redshift of z  8.2 by N. R. Tanvir et al. The second is GRB 090423 at a redshift of z  8.1 by R. Salvaterra et al.   First detected by NASA Swift satellite on April 23, 2009 at 3:55 a.m. EDT, GRB 090423 was observed on the ground within minutes of its discovery. Gemini Observatory in Hawaii attempted an observation in optical (visible) light and when the detection was negative, used the Near-infrared Imager/Spectrograph to make the observation…

Get your submissions in for a special, 150th Origin of Species anniversary edition of the Carnival of Evolution, going online November first. I've already received a whole slew of outstanding contributions; submit your writing and it will be in good company. You can submit via the online submission form. If you have any problems with submission, email me via my contact form. Read the feed:

A LiveScience article entitled "Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans" raises several questions of which many are simply the quest for details regarding origins and migrations.  However, there were a couple of questions that focused on other elements and warrant some consideration. Question #5: Is Human Evolution Accelerating "...saying that it remains difficult to ascertain whether or not certain genes really have recently grown in prominence because they offer some adaptive benefit." What I find interesting in this statement is the point that genes have to provide some adaptive…