Photo by jby.It’s fresh and online at Teaching Biology.◼
Carnival of Evolution, July 2013
Photo by jby.Category Archives: evolution
Photo by jby.Science online, visibly relevant edition
Dandelions are packed with yummy glucosinolates. Photo by nothingtosay.- This week, at The Molecular Ecologist: I review a book that rebuts Stephen Jay Gould’s paleontological perspective.
- Or ringworlds. The search for alien civilizations may be simpler if we look for Dyson spheres.
- “They told me I made a bomb on school property …” Kiera Wilmot speaks out.
- Depends what you mean by “phytonutrients.” Are the wild ancestors of dometic crops more nutritious?
- Oops. Guy calling for more scientific outreach seems not to know much about scientific outreach.
- Of course I was going to link to this. Failed experiments are the Kobayashi Maru test of science.
- Score (yet another) one for Charles Darwin. Phylogenetic diversity predicts primary productivity.
- Dolphins are assholes. Which is why you’d have to be nuts to invite some to your childbirthing.
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The Molecular Ecologist: Relentless Evolution
Darwin’s finches, like this medium ground finch, are a prime example of what John Thompson calls “relentless evolution.” Photo by David Cook Wildlife Photography.When I was just starting graduate school, one of the first things I wanted was readings to get me up to speed on the current state of research on the evolution of interactions between species. My dissertation advisor handed me The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution, by John Thompson (who, it should be said, had been my advisor’s postdoctoral mentor). Thompson turned out to be just the author for the job, wrangling a huge body of research into a clear, straightforward text, and all in support of his argument that metapopulation dynamics—populations linked by migration across a landscape of varied environments—are the engine driving much of evolution.
Now, Thompson’s published a new book, titled Relentless Evolution, which pretty much picks up where The Geographic Mosaic left off. And I’ve reviewed it for The Molecular Ecologist.
Gould’s “paradox of the visibly irrelevent” holds that, if we are to understand the river of evolutionary history, we must look below the spume and spray of year-to-year adaptative change to find the deeper currents that can, over time, carve canyons. In his new book Relentless Evolution (University of Chicago Press, $35.00 in paperback), John N. Thompson makes the opposing argument with gusto: To Thompson, studying the roiling eddies that Gould dimissed as transient and superficial is the only way to understand the deeper currents, and the river’s course ahead of us.
Should you run out and buy a copy? If you’re even slightly on the fence, I suggest you go read my whole review.◼
Carl Zimmer on the evolution of feathers, animated
Clever, informative, beautiful.
Via CZ, and many of the more discerning parts of the Internet.◼
Carnival of Evolution, May 2013
Photo by Never House.I am reliably informed that the monthly round-up of online writing about evolution is available now at DNA Barcoding. Reserve a nice long block of time to peruse the links—this month’s carnival is bigger on the inside.◼
Carnival of Evolution, April 2013
What kind of sequencing capacity do they have in Tomorrowland? Photo by Big DumpTruck.The April 2013 edition of the Carnival of Evolution is online over at Synthetic Daisies. This issue of the monthly collection of online writing about all things evolution-y is organized around the theme of the future of evolution—which looks to be full of exciting possibilities. There’s experimental phylogenetics and speculation about radio-sensing animals and species coming back from the dead, so maybe you should go peruse the whole thing.◼
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Making sense of pollinators’ role in creating new plant species
A Joshua tree flower. Photo by jby.Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! I’ve got a new post discussing freshly published results from my dissertation research on Joshua trees and their pollinators. I don’t have to tell you why Joshua trees are interesting, do I?
Joshua trees are pollinated by yucca moths, which are unusually focused, as pollinators go. Your average honeybee will blunder around in a flower, scooping up pollen and drinking nectar, and maybe accidentally pollinate the flower in the process. A yucca moth, on the other hand, gathers up a nice, tidy bundle of pollen in specialized mouthparts, carries it to another Joshua tree flower, and deliberately packs it into place. She does that because the fertilized flower provides more than a little nectar for her—she’s laid her eggs inside the fertilized flower, and when they hatch her offspring will eat some of the seeds developing inside it.
That’s pretty cool in its own right. But what’s especially interesting about Joshua trees, from an evolutionary perspective, is that they’re pollinated by two different moth species. And it turns out that the flowers of Joshua trees associated with the different moth species also look pretty different. The most dramatically different feature is in the length of the stylar canal in the pistil, the part of the flower that determines how the moths lay their eggs.
In the latest development, my collaborators and I tested for genetic evidence that Joshua trees pollinated by different moth species are isolated from each other. To learn what we found, go read the whole thing.◼
Science online, selected swallows edition
Cliff swallow in flight. Photo by donjd2.- This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Doing natural history like a Victorian—but with gigabytes of genetic data.
- And, at the Molecular Ecologist: A tale of two Dryad submissions.
- Speedy evolution in more ways than one. Cliff swallows living under highway bridges have evolved shorter wings—maybe because they help dodge oncoming cars.
- Breaking! It’s possible to make science accessible without reinforcing sexist stereotypes.
- Which, I would argue, is most of the time. When evolution and ecology happen at the same time.
- Not the only way in which it’s fantastical. The paleofantasy of “alternative” medicine.
- Step one: read good science writing. How to write good science.
- Handy! Convert technical units of measurement into more comprehensible terms using Wolfram Alpha!
- And why that makes the whole business suspect. Why proposals to resurrect extinct species are really all about Homo sapiens.
- First, they came for the political scientists … The U.S. Senate decides it can ban the National Science Foundation from funding an entire field of research.
- Related: who still does this? Why do we call it the “wild type,” anyway?
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Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Making sense of gene tree conflict across an entire genome
The only illustration in The Origin of Species. Image via Wikimedia Commons.This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, I discuss my latest research paper, which has just been published online ahead of print in Systematic Biology. In it, my coauthors and I use a genome-wide data set to reconstruct relationships among a couple dozen species in the genus Medicago—a data set that proved to be kind of a challenge.
Using that data, we identified some 87,000 individual DNA bases that varied among the sampled species—single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. That’s not a lot in terms of actual sequence data—but considering that every one of those 87,000 SNPs is a variable character, and that most of them were probably spread far enough across the genome to have independent evolutionary histories, it contains many more independent “gene trees” than most DNA data sets used to estimate phylogenies.
To learn how we tackled all those gene trees, and what we found when we did, go read the whole thing.◼
Human evolution, animated
Yes, yes, evolutionary change occurs in populations, not individuals. But this animation does a rather nice job of illustrating those population-wide changes in the lineages closest to modern humans.
Via The Hairpin.◼