Evolution

I am traveling back from Brown University (on Amtrak's Acela Express train, ah, the civilization of the Northeast!), where I participated in a panel discussion on evolution and religion together with Ed Larson (Pepperdine University, author of the Pulitzer winning Summer for the Gods on the Scopes trial), art historian Mary Bergstein (Rhode Island School for Design), and Brown's own Ken Miller, twice guest on The Colbert Report, author of a popular biology textbook and of the somewhat troublesome -- if much acclaimed -- Finding Darwin's God. I have met Ken several times…

Show Me The Science Month Day 21 Why do certain species of fruit flies prefer some fruits over others? Two biologists have looked at the genetic basis behind the evolution of fruit preference, in a paper in this month's issue of Genetics (an incredible issue which happens to contain another amazing, pioneering, paradigm-shifting, ground-breaking paper). Many insects specialize in feeding on just one or a few types of plants. This fact isn't that surprising, since plants have all sorts of defenses for warding off insects, including the production of toxic chemical compounds, and insects that…

If you are looking for new Genomicron posts, visit here.

Show Me The Science Month Day 20 Tumor cells wield the enzyme heparanase like a machete to cut a swaththrough the dense forest of carbohydrates that make up the stickymatrix that helps hold communities of cells into tissues. Aggressive,metastatic tumor cells have to break free of the confines of thisextracellular matrix in order to both grow and colonize new parts ofthe body. In humans, heparanase is expressed at high levels in tumorcells, and it therefore makes an attractive drug target: knock outheparanase, and tumor cells can't bushwhack their way out of theconfines of the extracellular…

The commercials featuring the Geico caveman made it seem as if a Neandertal (also neanderthal) could readily interact within a Homo sapiens society.... we may soon find out if that is true. Recently, scientists at the Max Plank Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany announced that they had completed the sequencing of the Neandertal genome. Neandertals went extinct around 30,000 years ago - most likely because of an untimely interaction with the Cro-Magnon, our early ancestors. As was the case with most species on the planet, Neandertals did not fare well from their…

Show Me The Science Month Day 19 Some fish have two sets of teeth: oral teeth, set towards the front of the mouth (like ours), and so-called pharyngeal teeth, set far back in in the throat in a strange, second set of jaws. Based on what we learn from the fossils of ancient jawless fish, it appears that teeth first appeared on these deep pharyngeal jaws. So how did most vertebrates come to have the more common set of oral teeth? A group of scientists based in Georgia and Tennessee used paleontology and modern genetics to show that tweaks to an ancient gene regulatory network enabled the…

If it walks like a duck and talks like it a duck....it may, in fact, be a bikini model...  Okay, likely not. But we do sometimes group insects, animals and plants together because of superficial characteristics. No offense to bikini models here, I know you take your profession quite seriously and suggesting you walk like ducks in high heels might be misinterpreted as mean. Mean, mean convergent biologists. There are times when we classify animals together because of superficial characteristics and actually nail it. On those lucky occasions, the DNA supports our claim. Just as…

Show Me The Science Month Day 18 The transition from one-celled microbes to multicellularity was a huge step in the evolution of life on this planet, but as daunting as this evolutionary step seems, it didn't happen just once. Today's plants, fungi, animals, and various types of algae are all descendants of separate transitions to multicellular life. All of these transitions from a single-cell lifestyle to multicellularity occurred in the very distant past, so how can we learn anything about them? It turns out that it is not hard to find living, modern examples that closely parallel the…

Show Me The Science Month Day 17 Often when something new crops up in evolutionary history, it's usually the result of tinkering with functional, preexisting molecular tools.. In a paper published in Science, some NYU researchers find that the protein cues used by  fruit fly embryos to direct their migrating reproductive cells are processed by some very ancient cellular machinery. The scientists test their ideas with a very weird experiment: they use their newfound knowledge to direct the reproductive cells to migrate into the embryos' brains. Before we get to the ancient cellular…

I guess it was only a matter of time before my colleague Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago lost his patience while reading one of several pieces that appeared in the press about the current and future status of evolutionary theory. After having commented negatively, in both Nature and Science, on a workshop of evolutionary theory that I organized last summer at Altenberg (Austria), Jerry has just published a blog post in which he criticizes highly respected science journalist Carl Zimmer. Zimmer’s sin is to have favorably quoted yours truly about the excitement generated…