Evolution

(Publicado no jornal O Primeiro de Janeiro a 29/11/2007)O actual governo “devia governar um bocadinho mais à esquerda”, afirmou Mário Soares. Respondeu Vitalino Canas: "O PS governa à esquerda e de acordo com as possibilidades que tem de governar à esquerda". Onde têm origem estas lateralidades? E porque se imiscuem conceitos políticos em histórias de evolução e biologia?Comecemos pela primeira questão. A polaridade entre esquerda e direita surgiu no séc. XVIII durante a Revolução francesa. Esta demarcação despontou durante a fase da Monarquia Constitucional, quando os lugares da…

The debate over gene selection versus group or multi-level selection continues unabated in biological circles, and no end appears in sight. Despite a resurgence of interest in group selection, the gene-only theorists refuse to concede an inch of ground, but I fear the high tide of gene selection is on the ebb and will never dominate again. For there are two basic flaws in gene selection, flaws so obvious it’s astonishing that the theory ever floated at all. The first flaw is that evolution, natural selection and biological fitness are inextricably linked to reproduction, yet genes do not…

The most recent issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is now available free online. This is a special issue devoted to the evolution of eyes. You may recognize some of the names in the table of contents, as several of these authors are also bloggers. Enjoy. Evolution: Education and OutreachVolume 1 Issue 4The evolution of eyesEdited by T. Ryan Gregory Editorial 351. Editorial by Gregory Eldredge and Niles Eldredge (PDF) 352-354. Introduction by T. Ryan Gregory (PDF) 355-357. Casting an Eye on Complexity by Niles Eldredge (PDF) Original science / evolution reviews 358-389. The Evolution…

A Duke University study suggests that evolution can behave as differently as dogs and cats. While the dogs depend on an energy-efficient style of four-footed running over long distances to catch their prey, cats seem to have evolved a profoundly inefficient gait, tailor-made to creep up on a mouse or bird in slow motion. "It is usually assumed that efficiency is what matters in evolution," said Daniel Schmitt, a Duke associate professor of evolutionary anthropology. "We've found that's too simple a way of looking at evolution, because there are some animals that need to operate at high…

The news coming out of the recent, and much trumpeted, Vatican-sponsored conference on evolution isn’t that good, according to a brief article that appeared in Science magazine on November 14. Molecular biologist John Abelson commented on the most controversial figure at the conference, Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn: “He believes there are gaps in evolution and [that] God acts in those gaps.” Oh boy, not the “gap theory” again? Schönborn is infamous for an op-ed piece he published in the New York Times, “Finding design in nature,” in which he referred to neo-Darwinism as a “…

With hard bony shells to shelter and protect them, turtles are unique and have long posed a mystery to scientists who wonder how such an elegant body structure came to be.  Since the age of dinosaurs, turtles have looked pretty much as they do now with their shells intact, and scientists lacked conclusive evidence to support competing evolutionary theories. Now with the discovery in China of the oldest known turtle fossil, estimated at 220- million-years-old, scientists have a clearer picture of how the turtle got its shell.  Working with colleagues in China and Canada, Olivier…

I’ve recently touched on the delicate topic of human nature. Now it's the turn of the even more inflammatory subject of race. The occasion is provided by a short commentary in Science (1), reporting on a meeting of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). The reason that meeting was contentious is because of increasingly common research on differences in the genetic susceptibility to diseases among human populations, where “population” is often a thinly veiled synonym for race. Apparently, participants to the meeting were trying to come up with new language that was based on…

My displeasure with media stories continues today with another over-the-top, speculative, and tailor-made-for-quote-mining article from Discovery News. The gist of it is that some people saw a very large, single-celled organism leaving tracks in the sand. Therefore, we need to "revolutionize" the way we think about evolution because maybe this is the sort of creature that left trace fossils in the Cambrian. The choice bits: Single-Celled Giant Upends Early Evolution Slowly rolling across the ocean floor, a humble single-celled creature is poised to revolutionize our understanding of how…

Yesterday our department hosted Peter and Rosemary Grant, who spoke about their 30+ years studying natural selection and finches in the Galapagos. (If you're interested in the book version of their work, check out Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Beak of the Finch.) While the Grants give a great presentation, full of pictures the Galapagos finches in action, my first impression was that none of this was really groundbreaking. As the Grants mentioned multiple times in the talk, Darwin anticipated so much of what they observe in the Galapagos. In an age of molecular genetics, a…

A couple of years ago I co-taught a course in philosophy and science with a colleague in the Philosophy department at Stony Brook University. At some point the issue of “human nature” came up, and my colleague looked at me with a mix of surprise and pity: human nature, she maintained, is a quaint concept that has been long abandoned by serious scholars, so why are we still talking about it? Tell it to James Fowler and Darren Schreiber, who recently authored a paper in the prestigious Science magazine (7 November 2008) by the title “Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature…