Photograph by James Wood.
Photography contest, Honorable Mention.
Tachyglossus aculeatus – short-beaked echidna, or spiny anteater, wandering along the edge of the Jordan River, Midlands, Tasmania. One of Australia’s two native monotremes. Echidnas in Tasmania are somewhat hairier than individuals on the mainland and are recognized as subspecies setosus, one of five recognized subspecies.
I'm one of those dreadful animal-centric zoologically inclined biologists. Plants? What are those? Fungi? They're related to metazoans somehow. Lichens? Not even on the radar. The first step in fixing a problem, though, is recognizing that you have one. So I confess to you, O Readers, that my name is PZ, and I am a metazoaphile. But I can get better.
My path to opening up to wider horizons is to focus on what I find most interesting about animals, and that is that they are networks of cells driven by networks of genes that generate patterned responses of expression by cell signaling, or communication. See? I'm already a little weird. Show me a baby bunny, and I don't just see a cute little furry pal with an adorable twitchy nose, I see an organized and coherent array of differentiated tissues that arose by a temporal sequence of cell-cell interactions, and I just wanna open him up and play with his widdle epithelial sheets and dismantle his pwetty ducts and struts and fibers and fluids, oochy coo. And ultimately, I want to take apart each cell and ask why it has its particular assortment of genes switched off and on, and how its state affects its neighbors and the whole of the organism.
Which means, lately, that I've acquired a growing interest in bacteria. If I were 30 years younger, I could probably be seduced into a career in microbiology.
There are a couple of reasons why an animal-centric biologist would be interested in bacteria. One is the principle of it; the mechanisms that animal cells use to build complex arrangements of tissues were all first pioneered in single-celled organisms. We have elaborated and added details to gene- and cell-level phenomena, but it's a collection of significant quantitative differences, with nothing known that is essentially new in metazoan cells. All the cool stuff was worked out by evolution in the 3-4billion years before the Cambrian, a potential that simply blossomed in the past half-billion years into big conglomerations of cells. Understanding how the building blocks of multicellularity work individually ought to be a prerequisite to understanding how the assemblages work.
But there's another reason, too, a difference in perspective. It is our conceit to regard ourselves as individuals of Homo sapiens, a body of cells clonally derived from a single human cell. It's not true. It turns out that each one of us is actually a whole population of species, linked by our evolutionary history and lumbering through the world as a team. Genus Homo is also genera Escherichi and Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes and many others.
Photograph by Kari Tikannen.
Photography contest, Honorable Mention.
Fraunhofer lines appear in sunlight reflected off a CD. The Fraunhofer lines are the dark absorption lines superimposed upon the colored spectrum.
Photograph by Deanna Young.
Sciurus niger – fox squirrel. According to an article in the Times, his relative, the eastern gray squirrel, S. carolinensis, is considered an invasive species in Europe.
Castle Rock – part of the basalt rock cap atop South Table Mountain, Golden, Colorado, 2009.
Independence Day bouquet – Alpine thistle, daisy chrysanthemum, button chrysanthemum, spray rose. Flowers courtesy of Sturtz and Copeland Florists and Garden Center, Boulder, Colorado.
The second PT photography contest is accepting entries now through July 15. Please read and follow the rules here and pay particular attention to Rule 12.
Update, July 8: Just to clarify, we give preference to photographs of endangered species, but general entries are welcome as well. If we receive enough endangered species, we will establish a separate category. Entries in the animal, mineral, and vegetable categories are also welcome.
Update, July 15: The deadline for submissions is tonight at 10:00 Mountain Daylight Time. MDT is UTC(GMT) - 6 h.
Machu Picchu, Peru, 2005.
I just received a letter from Michael Zimmerman, addressed to “Members and Friends of The Clergy Letter Project.” The gist of the letter is that Evolution Weekend will be 11-13 February 2011 and will once again provide religious congregations the opportunity to discuss evolution and how it can be accommodated into their worldview. In addition, congregations are encouraged to discuss “the many environmental threats to the health of both natural and human communities.” The relevant part of Professor Zimmerman’s letter follows.
While we’re waiting to see if one of our paleo people will post at greater length on this, I will call attention to Case Western Reserve University’s Center for Human Origins’ material on the recent publication of a report on a very early specimen of Australopithecus afarensis. It shows evidence of bipedalism as early as 3.6 mya. The specimen is dubbed “Kadanuumuu,” or “big man” in Afar, the language of the region of Ethiopia in which it was found, because it is from a male over 5 feet tall. That contrasts with Lucy, a female only about 3.5 feet tall from 3.2 mya. The skeletal remains overlap Lucy’s considerably with the exception of cranial and dental material which is missing from Kadanuumuu. The work was recently published in PNAS.
Other coverage from the National Science Foundation and from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (one of the founding partners in Case’s Center for Human Origins).
Photograph by David Fletcher.
Stenocercus crassicaudatus – spiny whorltail iguana, Machu Picchu, Peru.
My colleague Paul Strode wrote a very clear and concise explanation of Ernst Haeckel’s “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” law for our book Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails). In Chapter 11, Strode explains that Haeckel was wrong in thinking that embryos resemble the ancestral adult forms; rather, early embryos resemble the embryos of ancestral forms. In other words, Haeckel was on to something, but he didn’t get it quite right. Strode explains further, “Recapitulation nevertheless provides helpful insight into evolutionary relationships and ancestry,” and argues that von Baer’s law is closer to the truth. Chapter 11 follows:
Via Daniel Florien at Unreasonable Faith.
NCSE has made available (with appropriate permissions) pdfs of a bunch of book chapters well worth reading on their own. They are from:
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin Of Species: A Graphic Adaptation by Michael Keller
The Tangled Bank by Carl Zimmer
Evolution, Second Edition By Douglas J. Futuyma
Evidence of Evolution by Susan Middleton and Mary Ellen Hannibal
Evolution: The story of life by Douglas Palmer
Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be by Daniel Loxton
Rapture Ready! by Daniel Radosh
Evolution vs. Creationism, 2nd edition by Eugenie C. Scott
Photograph by Tom Harnish.
Lily by Kate Lister.
Zantedeschia elliottiana – yellow or golden arum lily.
The photographer, Tom Harnish, writes that Zantedeschia is often misnamed Calla: “Zantedeschia is a different genus than Calla – not a small distinction if you consider that dogs and cats are two different genera (Canidae and Felidae). Imagine going into a pet store and seeing signs over the puppies that indicate they’re cats? Oddly, most garden shops label these flowers calla (even cala) lilies, and that’s what most people call them. Zantedeschia, shown here, are from tropical Africa, and should not be confused with the smaller white calla that grows in bogs of northern Europe, Asia, and North America.”
A widely publicised paper published on May 7th 2010 announced that a first draft of the Neandertal genome from three individuals - 4 billion base pairs - had been sequenced (Green et al. 2010: A draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome). This was about two thirds of the entire Neanderthal genome. Even more sensationally, their findings seem to show convincingly that Neanderthals interbred with humans and that non-African modern humans contain between 1% and 4% of Neanderthal genes. Because Asians as well as Europeans have these Neanderthal genes, the researchers believe the most likely explanation is that the interbreeding occurred in the Middle East when modern humans first left Africa between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago, and before they expanded into the rest of the world.
A couple of weeks earlier, on April 20th, Nature had published an online article about results presented at a scientific conference by a group from New Mexico, but not yet released in the scientific literature (Dalton 2010: Neanderthals may have interbred with humans). Unlike the Green et al. paper, these researchers did not sequence Neanderthal genes directly and compare them with those of modern humans. Instead, they tried to explain the patterns of variation in gene sequences found in modern humans, and found that the patterns seemed to show humans had interbred with an archaic species at two different periods: around 60,000 years ago in the Middle East, and about 45,000 years ago in eastern Asia. The first of these periods would match up well with the time and place at which Green et al. claim human/Neanderthal interbreeding occurred. The second period might be showing that some humans bred with a late population of H. erectus or H. heidelbergensis in Asia.
The recent discovery of the “X woman” in southern Siberia might also be relevant here (Krause et al. 2010). This fossil, about 30,000-50,000 years old, was an insignificant-looking finger bone whose mitochondrial DNA was not only very different from any modern human, but even more different from humans than Neandertals are. Although we don’t know what its owner looked like or even what species it belonged to, it is striking evidence that some very genetically unusual people were living in Asia at about the same timeframe that the New Mexico group believes some archaic genes found their way into the human population.
Kodak Bantam 828, Kodak Signet 35 (l. to r.). The Kodachrome 64 is a mild anachronism.
This post announces the second (annual? Beginning to look that way) Panda’s Thumb photography contest. The winner(s) will receive a great deal of satisfaction and possibly a book.
Photograph by Greg Goebel.
Syrphidae – hover fly or flower fly, Loveland, Colorado.
Can any reader identify this fly – that is, provide the correct binomial name (genus and species)?
Photograph by Richard B. Hoppe.
Danaus plexippus – monarch butterfly egg, resting on Asclepias syriaca (milkweed) leaf, Monroe Township, Knox County, Ohio.
William Dembski calls envious attention to the funding (reportedly $25M) by NSF of the BEACON (Bio/computational Evolution in Action CONsortium ) project, a multi-institutional consortium that is intended
…to conduct research on fundamental evolutionary dynamics in both natural and artificial systems, educate a generation of multi-disciplinary scientists in these methods, and improve public understanding of evolution at all levels. The center will unite biologists who study natural evolutionary processes with computer scientists and engineers who are harnessing these processes to solve real-world problems.
Among the researchers associated with the consortium is Joe Felsenstein, who guest posts here on occasion. On a fast run-through of the personnel listing I also see at least four senior people who have been associated with the AVIDA project at Michigan State (Pennock, Lenski, Ofria, and Wilke) and other leaders in both evolutionary biology and computer modeling of evolution. The consortium includes Michigan State University (lead institution), along with the University of Washington, the University of Texas at Austin, North Carolina A&T, and the University of Idaho. I’ll be interested to see what comes out of it, especially given its lofty goals:
BEACON will have a powerful legacy: we will reframe public perceptions of evolution and increase understanding of scientific methods. At the same time, we will produce a conceptual framework to firmly establish evolutionary biology as an experimental science and cement its links to computing in a crossfertilization that enhances both fields.
See also here:
K-12 and general public education.
In this area, BEACON will pursue four main goals:
* Demonstrate the fundamental power and importance of evolution. BEACON will contribute to the pressing national need to bolster U.S. pre-eminence in science and technology by educating people about the importance of understanding, managing and harnessing biological and computational evolutionary processes and deconstructing the false dichotomy of micro- versus macro-evolution.
* Disseminating materials generated by BEACON. Our team includes experts in science education and outreach who will work with all BEACON researchers to adapt BEACON research for use in science classes in schools in ways that address national science standards and goals.
* Increasing participation in science and engineering. We will broaden participation in STEM disciplines by introducing teachers and students from underrepresented groups to the new research opportunities afforded by BEACON’s applied evolutionary tools and research programs.
* Preparing responsible citizens. We will deepen student’s understanding of evolution-related challenges, such as responding to the evolution of infectious diseases and limiting the evolution of antibiotic and pesticide resistance, and have them learn to protect the integrity of the scientific process.
Those are high aspirations.
Borodin was an amateur. So was Charles Ives. Bobby Jones was an amateur. Bill Tilden was an amateur, at least until he was 37 or 38. Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson were amateurs. According to Publisher’s Weekly, so is Mark Sumner.
Sumner is the author of the book The Evolution of Everything: How Selection Shapes Culture, Commerce, and Nature. It is difficult to classify this book, but if I had to do so, I would say that it not only tells the history of natural selection in biology but also relates it to business and commerce. And it does so in an interesting, compelling way: Even though I thought I knew something about the contents of many of the chapters, Sumner managed to introduce some tidbit, some wrinkle that I did not know into virtually every discussion.
