Archive for Evolution
November 19, 2008 at 2:15 am · Filed under Evolution
As part of my daily diet of news sites and blog reading I keep an eye on various creationist websites. This is done partly as opposition research. It’s always good to know what the crazy people are getting excited about. But it is also because they frequently link to interesting articles I might have overlooked otherwise.
Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O’Leary helpfully linked to this article by Carl Zimmer from the November 10 issue of The New York Times. The article discusses recent developments in genetics, and how hey are changing long-held notions of what a gene is. It’s fascinating stuff, but O’Leary seemed especially taken with the following excerpt:
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Original post by Jason Rosenhouse none@example.com
November 19, 2008 at 2:15 am · Filed under Evolution
As part of my daily diet of news sites and blog reading I keep an eye on various creationist websites. This is done partly as opposition research. It’s always good to know what the crazy people are getting excited about. But it is also because they frequently link to interesting articles I might have overlooked otherwise.
Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O’Leary helpfully linked to this article by Carl Zimmer from the November 10 issue of The New York Times. The article discusses recent developments in genetics, and how hey are changing long-held notions of what a gene is. It’s fascinating stuff, but O’Leary seemed especially taken with the following excerpt:
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
Original post by Jason Rosenhouse none@example.com
November 18, 2008 at 8:42 am · Filed under Evolution
Richard Lawler pointed me to a new paper by Sean Rice, A stochastic version of the Price equation reveals the interplay of deterministic and stochastic processes in evolution. The Price Equation is the generalization of selective evolutionary dynamics by the amateur evolutionary biologist George Price which so impressed W. D. Hamilton. But as Rice notes it only captures a slice of the various parameters which influence evolutionary processes. Like some other papers I’ve pointed too Rice presents some relatively counter-intuitive results, or at least results which confound our general expectations, by scratching beyond the surface of the assumptions of conventional population genetic models:
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Original post by Razib none@example.com
November 14, 2008 at 3:30 pm · Filed under Evolution
When we think about cooperative behaviour, most of us would think of animals like ants, meerkats, lions or, indeed, humans. But don’t rule out yeast. The small, single-celled fungus has provided us with much of our knowledge of genetics and molecular biology and now, it’s shedding light on the evolution of cooperation too.
The budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is one of the most widely studied of laboratory microbes, but scientists mostly know it as a solitary species. Brewers, on the other hand, use S.cerevisiae to make beer and are all too aware of its social side. Their strains have a tendency to form large clumps, or “flocs”, which makes them easier to remove from beer once fermentation is complete. This clumping process - flocculation - has been mostly ignored by scientists because lab strains don’t do it.
Enter Scott Smukalla from Harvard University. His group found that flocculation is a great example […]
Original post by Ed Yong none@example.com
November 12, 2008 at 2:31 am · Filed under Evolution
There have been several attempts to produce an ontology of biology and the life sciences in general. One of the more outstanding was Joseph Woodger’s 1937 The Axiomatic Method in Biology, which was based on Russell’s and Whitehead’s Principia and the theory of types. In this, Woodger attempted to develop a logic system that would account for all the objects of the theories of biology, especially of embryology, physiology (including cell theory) and genetics. It was hard going even for logicians (Tarski himself wrote an appendix), and the theory thus elucidated seemed to be very post hoc - it was unclear how it helped theories in biology.
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Original post by John S. Wilkins none@example.com
November 10, 2008 at 11:08 am · Filed under Evolution
E.O. Wilson shifts his position on altruism in nature:
It is a puzzle of evolution: If natural selection dictates that the fittest survive, why do we see altruism in nature? Why do worker bees or ants, for instance, refrain from competing with those around them, but instead search for food or build nests on behalf of their companions? Why do they sacrifice their own reproductive success for the good of the group?
In the 1960s, British biologist William Hamilton offered an explanation in a theory now called kin selection. When animals, often insects, help siblings or other relatives survive, they are enhancing the odds that their shared family genes will be passed on. In other words, the genes, not the individual or social group, are what counts in evolution.
Hamilton’s idea was eventually accepted by most biologists, and found an enthusiastic backer, at the time, in Edward O. Wilson, the renowned Harvard evolutionist.
That […]
Original post by Razib none@example.com
October 30, 2008 at 3:59 pm · Filed under Evolution
Evolution of trust and trustworthiness: social awareness favours personality differences (Open Access):
Interest in the evolution and maintenance of personality is burgeoning. Individuals of diverse animal species differ in their aggressiveness, fearfulness, sociability and activity. Strong trade-offs, mutation-selection balance, spatio-temporal fluctuations in selection, frequency dependence and good-genes mate choice are invoked to explain heritable personality variation, yet for continuous behavioural traits, it remains unclear which selective force is likely to maintain distinct polymorphisms. Using a model of trust and cooperation, we show how allowing individuals to monitor each other’s cooperative tendencies, at a cost, can select for heritable polymorphisms in trustworthiness. This variation, in turn, favours costly ’social awareness’ in some individuals. Feedback of this sort can explain the individual differences in trust and trustworthiness so often documented by economists in experimental public goods games across a range of cultures. Our work adds to growing evidence that evolutionary game theorists […]
Original post by Razib none@example.com
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