Life Sciences
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When Charles Darwin was thrashing out his theory of evolution, he would doodle sometimes in his notebooks. To explain how new species came into existence, he wrote down letters on a page and then connected them with branches. In the process, he created a simple tree. Across the top of the page, he wrote, "I think."
That single tree has given rise to the thousands of trees that are published in scientific journals these days. A particular tree may show that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than gorillas. It might show how the SARS virus in humans descends from viruses in other…
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The Great Lakes of East Africa swarm with fish--particulary with one kind of fish known as cichlids. In Lake Victoria alone you can find over 500 species. These species come in different colors and make their living in many different ways--sucking out eyeballs of other cichlids, scraping algae off of rocks, and so on. What's strange about all this is that the Great Lakes of East Africa are some of the youngest lakes on Earth. By some estimates, Lake Victoria was a dry lake bed 15,000 years ago. All that diversity has evolved in a very short period of time.
East African cichlids are therefore…
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Thanks again for the comments on my previous two posts about eugenics. As a novice blogger, I was surprised by their focus. I expected comments about the past--the historical significance of the eugenics movement--but instead the future dominated, with assorted speculations about the possible futures that genetic engineering could bring to our species. By coincidence, I've been thinking about the future as well, but from a different angle, thanks to a pair of papers in press at Trends In Ecology and Evolution. Instead of introduced genes, they're interested in introduced species.
Before…