Evolution

Human laughter can be traced back 10-16 million years to the last common ancestor of humans and great apes, according to new research published today.   Dr Marina Davila Ross, a primatologist of the psychology department at the University of Portsmouth, reconstructed the origins of human laughter by mapping the laughter sounds of great apes and humans on an evolutionary tree. In Davila Ross’s reconstructed evolutionary tree, humans were closest to bonobos and chimpanzees, more distant from gorillas and most distant from orangutans.   Biologists always love when researchers in…

The genetic code is fixed in most organisms, but sometimes microbes pull off a swap. How that swap works is hard to fathom, because you can screw up nearly all of your genes by doing it. A paper out today in Nature finds (among many other things) looks at how the yeast genus Candida pulled off such a swap. Candida yeast are responsible for most human yeast infections. To get a better handle on how these yeast reproduce and become virulent, a group sequenced the genomes of 6 different Candida species, bringing the total number of Candida genomes to 8. By comparing these genomes, researchers…

Like human infants, young apes are make noises when you tickle them.  Is that really laughter? The answer to the question is yes, say researchers in Current Biology. The researchers analyzed the recorded sounds of tickle-induced vocalizations produced by infant and juvenile orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos, as well as those of human infants. A quantitative phylogenetic analysis of those acoustic data found that the best "tree" to represent the evolutionary relationships among those sounds matched the known evolutionary relationships among the five species based on genetics…

When we think of volcanic conditions, our minds leap to images of vast eruptions like Mount St. Helens in Washington State, or lava oozing down the slopes of Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. With my family, I once visited that lava flow. We are used to stones being “rock solid” but here molten orange-hot rock oozes across a two-lane road and pours over a cliff, causing clouds of steam to erupt from the Pacific Ocean. My daughter Ásta, five years old at the time, was understandably very suspicious of the stuff and would not go near the lava flow. It radiated an oven-like heat, even from…

It should be clear that the vast majority of biological interactions are largely indifferent to others, while there is also a high degree of cooperation as necessitated by the evolution of sexual reproduction. It is this level of cooperation that has also given rise to many animals living in groups or participating in group arrangements. While there are many animals that are asocial, there are also a significant number that regularly interact and form groups of varying sizes. It should be clear that the formation of such groups is a cooperative effort, but more importantly it also gives rise…

The Art Of Torture More than 28 million Americans, and many more people throughout the world, suffer from migraine headaches, one of the most debilitating of pain disorders. Symptoms like excruciating pain, visual disturbance and disorientation are often compounded by long-term emotional, physical and financial costs. I am a migraine sufferer.  A migraine attack can trigger visual hallucinations of great beauty, but all too often accompanied by great agony.  It is absolute torture. It has long been suggested that the migraine sufferer is experiencing in a major way what most people…

The key issue in considering competition is the question of whether changes in resource availability or mates would alter the confrontation. If the answer is negative, then no competition can be said to have occurred. The mere existence of confrontation does not necessarily denote competition. So in considering competition the definition will be focused specifically on the conditions whereby two individuals engage each other in some confrontation for a specific and separate resource. To that end, one of the individuals will end up acquiring that resource while the other is either eliminated…

VIB (the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology) researchers linked to K.U.Leuven and Harvard University say they have shown that stretches of DNA previously believed to be useless 'junk' DNA play a vital role in the evolution of our genome. Their findings were that unstable pieces of junk DNA help tuning gene activity and enable organisms to quickly adapt to changes in their environments. Junk DNA in two paragraphs "Most people do not realize that all our genes only comprise about 3% of the total human genome. The rest is basically one large black box,"  says Kevin Verstrepen, heading…

Creationism Axed - Again !The stone axe from 400,000 years ago which has been described as "the most important stone tool in the establishment of the geological antiquity of humankind" was mislaid for many years.  It has been  rediscovered thanks to the efforts of  Professor Clive Gamble, an archaeologist in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. On 27 April 1859, seven months before Darwin published his ‘Origin of species’, a momentous discovery was made in a gravel pit outside Amiens in northern France. Two English businessmen, Joseph Prestwich…

At this point it will be useful to examine some of the selection pressures that will also affect a species. The obvious ones are the need for resources to maintain the day-to-day activities necessary for basic survival and the need to locate and contend with available mates for reproduction. Within the context of reproduction, controls have evolved to ensure that equilibrium exists between the number of produced offspring and the number that will likely reach adulthood. This is an important element in the entire process since being too successful will increase interspecies competition and…