The latest entry in the wide-ranging Guest Blog at Scientific American is a post by yours truly, about a subject I’ve discussed before:
Since the Origin was first published, biologists have come to use the phrase ecological opportunity to describe the processes that can produce a diverse group of species from a single colonizing ancestor. Islands provide colonizing species with new food resources and an escape from predators and competitors. Under these highly favorable conditions, island species can live at much higher population densities than possible on the mainland—a phenomenon called density compensation. This increase in population size is often accompanied by increased variation among individuals, and greater competition from crowding neighbors creates strong benefits for individuals that try new ways to make a living.
Given enough time, one big, variable population will begin to fracture into smaller populations with different lifestyles. Given even more time, those smaller populations will stop interbreeding, and become different enough to call separate species. If that seems like a stretch of the imagination, consider that the processes of ecological opportunity are occurring all around us—as invasive species spread across the landscape, and viruses multiply in a new victim’s bloodstream.
To learn how ecological opportunity really is all around us, you’ll have to go check out the whole post.
Kudzu, taking advantage of ecological opportunity. Photo by Suzie T.
Reference
Yoder, J.B., S. Des Roches, J.M. Eastman, L. Gentry, W.K.W. Godsoe, T. Hagey, D. Jochimsen, B.P. Oswald, J. Robertson, B.A.J. Sarver, J.J. Schenk, S.F. Spear, & L.J. Harmon. (2010). Ecological opportunity and the origin of adaptive radiations. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 23, 1581-96 DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02029.x
A bit like “curing” a stain by re-upholstering your entire couch. It’s possible to cure HIV infection with a bone marrow stem cell transplant, but not exactly practical.
Because non-scientific activism is ubiquitous. Why scientific activism is often vital.
My friend Luke Swenson has just started a blog for the Vancouver, BC-based HIV awareness organization YouthCo. Luke’s working on a Ph.D. in HIV’s evolutionary response to drug treatment at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and he’ll be using the blog to explain new scientific results and how they relate to treatment and prevention strategies.
His inaugural post discusses the German AIDS patient who was recently confirmed to have been cured by a bone marrow transplant—it’s pretty clear that this cure comes at a steep price. (Full disclosure: Luke asked me for comments on an earlier draft of the post.) Go check it out and welcome Luke to the science blogosphere!
Run, run, as fast as you can … For small ground birds like ptarmigans, the energetic cost of running decreases as they go faster.
Declining effect. Ecologists really shouldn’t be all that surprised, or worried, about the “decline effect”.
Skin guns don’t heal people. Doctors with skin guns heal people. A new “skin gun” can heal second-degree burns by spraying them with stem cells.
Microscopic foraminifera know more than you might think. The history of a warming Northwest Passage is encoded in plankton.
Ants are total mutualism sluts. Microbes living on leafcutter ants generate antibiotics that may help fight bacterial infections of the ants’ fungus gardens.
Harder than it sounds. Science educators need to know when, and how, to say, “I don’t know.”
Is that a just-so story in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?Scicurious and A Primate of Modern Aspect consider adaptive explanations for the shape of the human penis.
In another round of neurotic revisionism, I’m taking Denim and Tweed to full Facebook. That means this blog now has a Facebook fan page, and a new widget placed prominently in the sidebar. This makes three box-of-faces widgets in the D&T sidebar, and that’s frankly too many. So I’ll be phasing out both the Blogger and NetworkedBlogs boxes in about a month from today. (You can still follow D&T through those systems, your followership just won’t be recorded in the sidebar.) Sorry! My aim is to make this the last such rejiggering for the long term.
Two million years of eating bamboo. Although fossils of the giant panda’s ancestors are few and far between, paleontologists are beginning to piece together their evolutionary history.
Context! Ed Yong compiles five years of stem cell research into an interactive timeline.
Boy, is my face red. How did blushing evolve as an involuntary social signal?
And now, Nature Video explains a new study [$a] that suggests why seahorses are horse-shaped. Via The Hairpin.
Correction, 11:25h: I’ve just been informed that the fish in the photograph below are not swordtails, but guppies. Burned again by Flickr taxonomy! The real Darwin would’ve got it right, I’m sure.
The Carnival of Evolution is a monthly collection of online writing about evolutionary biology and its cultural and political implications, hosted by a different blogger every month. Today, Denim and Tweed hosts CoE for the first time. Since Charles Darwin’s birthday is this month (only 12 shopping days left!), I thought it might be appropriate to imagine what Darwin himself might have to say about this month’s posts. Share and enjoy!
I was grateful for your very kind wishes; and for the book about the Anoles of the West Indes, which I expect I shall read with much enjoyment. The merest thought of an approaching 202nd birthday makes me feel the need for another trip to Malvern; but I do find some relief in my reading, of which I must needs do more every day it seems, only to keep abreast of the latest work. My great-grandson presented me last month with an i-Pad, a charming device; I can now consult the “web-logs” in the garden, when it is pleasant.
And there is such a lot of reading to do! It seems I read constantly about work extending the ideas I first proposed more than 150 years ago; it is gratifying, and rather humbling, to see what has grown from my little “abstract.” And dear old Wallace’s, of course. (Have you heard from Wallace recently? The last I knew of him, he was departing on that expedition with Greenpeace; but that was more than a year ago.)
I was also charmed to discover that butterflies of the species Eurybia lycisca, have evolved elaborately long tongues, long enough to take nectar without pollinizing; an unfortunate development for the flowers they visit! And I have recently seen a delightful study of the leaping of Blenniid fishes, supported by many moving pictures; and the very interesting findings of separated forms of the Clouded Leopard in Borneo and Sumatra.
(Here is a charming moving picture of the Clouded Leopard. What a blessing You-Tube is for the stay-at-home naturalist!)
Still more interesting to me is discovering the ways in which I was mistaken (embarrassing as they often are) and facts I was unable to percieve at the time of first writing. For instance, this extensive essay about Mosaic Evolution, or what I might call the Independent Modification of Parts; which evidently has its roots in Lamarckism. We may have been too harsh on the good Chevalier. Equally as interesting is this disquisition upon conditions in which Natural Selection may not lead to modification of descendants. Of course a lack of adaptation might be just as informative as the process of adaptative modification itself!
Of course the experiments of Gregor Mendel were an important improvement to what little understanding I mustered in The Origin; some suggest that now that Mendel’s thinking is over-simple, but it retains much power I feel. The study of living species is so very complicated! We must keep watch not only upon D.N.A. but the myriad complications of its translation to form the structures of the body, and even the duplication of genic code to originate new structures. The greater understanding we have gained since I first concieved of Natural Selection promises to continue improving the condition of humanity; I read, for example, that we may manipulate adaptations lengthen life at a cost to fecundity in order to breed more productive crops.
A pair of sword-tails guppies. Photo by Alice Chaos.
I have read recently also of several challenges to my original thoughts on Selection in Relation to Sex; experimentation has found, for example that the sexual ornaments of Xiphophorus sword-tailed fishes, do not hamper the males’ abilities to escape danger, which suggests they carry no great cost.
And of course it seems that there have always been persons who object to the idea that we might share kinship with apes and even sessile cirripedes; but fortuitously they seem not to have come up with any particularly novel arguments since 1859. And we may even use Natural Selection to explain the religions that deny the common descent; I suspect that social influences are greatly to blame.
With learned discussion so abundant and easy to find, it is truly a wonder that ignorance and misinformation persist; if only more people did their researches with proper care!
Yours very sincerely,
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this month’s Carnival! Want to submit posts for next month? Go to the BlogCarnivals form, or check out the list of past and future hosts at the carnival index page. Just as importantly, the Carnival needs hosts starting next month! If you’d like to host the Carnival, CoE overlord Bjørn Østman wants you to e-mail him right now.
Adaptation for a period of extremely short tempers during the Upper Cretaceous. Paleontologists discover a dinosaur with only one finger per forelimb.
Hey, nitrogen is nitrogen. A tropical bat species nests exclusively inside giant carnivorous pitcher plants, providing the the plants with an, um, alternative fertilizer.
“I want no other fame.” Population genetic data has confirmed a hypothesis about butterflies colonizing the Americas from Asia that was first proposed by Vladimir Nabokov. Yes, that Vladimir Nabokov.
When Caenorhabditis elegans catches a cold, scientists celebrate. A species of nematode widely used as an experimental organism has contracted a virus. Let the experiments in coevolution commence!
Video this week: actual, real-time, microscopic video of a malaria parasite invading a human blood cell, via New Scientist TV. The parasite, a smallish blob on the right, attaches to the outside of the big, round, red blood cell and disappears inside it—and then the red blood cell shrivels away.
The issues faced by women in the blogosphere—higher expectations, less recognition, and casual sexism—have officially emerged as the most important discussion topic in the wake of ScienceOnline 2011.
Kate Clancy kicked things off with her recap of the conference panel “Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name.” Christie Wilcox followed up by calling out the flagrant sexism of many of her male readers, which made David Dobbs righteously angry—and, seriously, who actually believes that any sentence containing the word “tits” is complimentary in any context? Emily Willingham noted that her voice is unique in ways beyond her gender. And now Clancy is rounding up the rapidly propagating conversation.
The conversation’s ongoing in the comments on all these posts, and (barring a handful of amazingly clueless folks) mostly great reading. My major thought on the subject remains what I said in first tweeting about the post that started it all: the most valuable parts of this conversation are the things that men are probably not all that happy to hear. When I read
We are all very, very tired of making a point on a blog, on twitter, or in a meeting, being ignored, having a man make the same point, then having that man get all the credit. Very tired.
my first thought was defensive: I’ve never done that! My second was, Oh, crap. Have I done that?
I’ve long believed that the value of a sermon is proportionate to how uncomfortable it makes its audience. No one needs to be told they’re doing just fine as they are. But if we’re not doing fine, we need to hear about it. So to the women science bloggers leading this conversation, I want to say: keep calling out male thoughtlessness, in specifics as well as in general. If I miss that you said something first because I’m not reading your blog, drop a link in the comments. If I write something stupid, e-mail me and complain. I may not be thrilled to be corrected, but that probably means I needed it.
The latest entry in the wide-ranging Guest Blog at Scientific American is a post by yours truly, about a subject I’ve discussed before:
Kudzu, taking advantage of ecological opportunity. Photo by Suzie T.
