Evolution

    Last week I described how a boulder-sized meteorite exploded in the skies over Murchison, Australia, forty years ago. The remarkable mix of organic compounds discovered in samples of the meteorite, which included amino acids, confirmed that some of the compounds required for the origin of life could have an extraterrestrial origin, as John Oro had proposed  ten years earlier. But where did the organic compounds come from, and how were they synthesized?      At this point I should make clear what I mean by the word organic. In common usage, something…

The genetic toolkit that animals use to build fins and limbs is the same genetic toolkit that controls the development of part of the gill skeleton in sharks, according to research published in PNAS by Andrew Gillis and Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago, and Randall Dahn of Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. The research builds on the breakthrough discovery of the fossil Tiktaalik, a "fish with legs," by Neil Shubin and his colleagues in 2006. "This is another example of how evolution uses common developmental programs to pattern different anatomical structures," said Shubin,…

As the U.S. Southwest grew warmer from 18,700 to 10,000 years ago, juniper trees vanished from what is now the Mojave Desert, robbing packrats of their favorite food. Now, University of Utah biologists have narrowed the hunt for detoxification genes that let the rodents eat toxic creosote bushes that replaced juniper. "It was either eat it or move out," says biology Professor Denise Dearing, senior author of the study, published online Tuesday, April 7 in the journal Molecular Ecology. During the study, eight packrats – also known as woodrats – were captured from each of two western…

The other day I posted on my FaceBook profile that I better hurry up to finish my presentation on epigenetic inheritance. One of my friends commented: “I have no idea what that means, but good luck to you!” Ironically, that is, in part, the point of my presentation: understanding what it all means. Let me explain. I am in Durham, NC, at the National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis, where — together with two former postdocs of mine — Christina Richards (soon at the University of South Florida) and Oliver Bossdorf (now at the University of Bern), I am running a brainstorming workshop…

The Oyster's Garter ("Science served wet and salty" - and I'm sure you can take that to mean whatever you want) is hosting the latest, greatest edition of Carnival of Evolution. Read about genetic changes involved in the evolution of pregnancy, about female birds who have some say in the matter of the sex of their offspring, a study suggesting that "that moral disgust “hitched a ride” on the more primitive reaction to poisonous or spoiled food," how ice fish manage to not freeze to death by ditching red blood cells, the true story behind evolution's greatest hoaxes, and much more. Go check it…

     In the summer of 1981, a colleague at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountainview, California, gave me a small black stone wrapped in aluminum foil that changed the course of my life. About the size of a marble and indistinguishable from any other rock that might be found on a beach, the stone was a piece of a meteorite that entered the Earth’s atmosphere over southern Australia in September 1969. It began with a bright fireball that broke up into several pieces,  followed by claps of thunder, and minutes later a shower of black stones  fell over several square…

UC Berkeley Paleontologist Kevin Padian (also president of the National Center for Science Education) reviews Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True in PLoS Biology. While he praises the book for for its clarity and well-chosen examples, Padian argues that Coyne, in a book that uses the word 'true' in the title', didn't actually talk enough about what truth is: Based on the title of this book I would have expected a bit more engagement with the philosophy of knowledge. How do we know something is true, and what do we mean when we say something is true? What could make us abandon our claims…

I recently saw W D Hamilton’s 1970 paper “Geometry for the Selfish Herd” described as “a classic in its own right.” As a long-time bibliophile this made it irresistible, but I was also intrigued by the incongruity of “selfish herd” and of linking geometry to animals. I have to report that the paper certainly is a classic, for all the wrong reasons, but it contains a valuable message. The introduction to the paper began with: This paper presents an antithesis to the view that gregarious behaviour is evolved through benefits to the population or species. Following Galton (1871) and Williams (…

    One of the earliest scientific speculations about the origin of life was Alexander Oparin’s proposal in 1924 that life began as jelly-like blobs he called coacervates. Oparin knew that the unit of life was the cell, but it had not yet been established that cells had membranous boundaries,  so coacervates were thought to be reasonable experimental models of the “protoplasm” that seemed to compose all cells.  Oparin also discussed conditions on the early Earth as part of the story, setting the stage for what would later become astrobiology. In 1929, J. B. S. Haldane…

30 Days of Evolution Blogging - The Finish Line Show Me The Science Month Day 30 Installment 30 To show that evolution is alive and well, back in January I decided to engage in a little stunt blogging - I planned to blog about one evolution research paper per day for 30 days, using only material published in January or February 2009. The point was that, over the course of 59 days (January + February), scientists would publish at least 30 good papers about some aspect of evolution. Why? Because evolution is a vibrant, active, experimental science, unlike intelligent design, which is a PR…