Species and systematics
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
Just lately there's been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven't had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support "sympatric" or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side effect of divergent selection. So here they are below the fold with abstracts and my comments...
Evolution of reproductive isolation in plantsHeredity advance online publication 23 July 2008; doi: 10.1038/hdy.2008.69
A Widmer, C Lexer and S Cozzolino
Reproductive isolation is essential for the process of speciation and much has been learned in…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
My Sciblings Bora, John, Brian and Benjamin have asked what the value of the history of science is to scientists. Below the fold is my apologia for writing a stonking great history of a scientific concept (species, in case the sidebar wasn't enough hint), in which I defend the worth of intellectual history to historians. Maybe it will add something to this debate. It is from the preface to my book. I hope the history of science is worthwhile, but it is interesting that the people who most wanted my book to be published are scientists working in the field on which I am writing, so I think it…
evolvingthoughts | July 29, 2008
Electron cryotomographic reconstruction of a C.
merolae cell. n = nucleus; c = chloroplast; p =
peroxisome; er = endoplasmic reticulum. Source
Elio Schaechter has a typically informative and informed post on the smallest eukaryotes, a kind of algae called picoeukaryotes. These guys make up half the biomass of all marine phages. Only known for about five or six years...
evolvingthoughts | July 26, 2008
A new genus name for water mites, from a recent paper in Zootaxa:
Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word ‘vagabundo’ that means ‘wanderer’. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time ago (Valdecasas et al. 2000) that the popularity of the Science Citation Index (SCI) as a measure of ‘good’ science has been damaging to basic taxonomic work. Despite statements to the contrary that SCI is not adequate to evaluate taxonomic production (Krell 2000), it is used routinely to evaluate taxonomists and prioritize research grant proposals. As with…
evolvingthoughts | July 25, 2008
Strange cladogram from another method, able to leap large evolutionary distances in a single bound, faster than a speeding parsimony analysis... oh, you get the idea.
A supertree is what you get when you add a number of possibly divergent partial phylogenies (evolutionary histories with a root) together to forma single tree. I envisage them as a kind of overlay of various trees, giving you a furry "consensus" and extending phylogenies to form larger phylogenies. How good they are, I can't say.
Anyway, a supertree analysis of most known dinosaurs shows that they did not undergo a sudden…
evolvingthoughts | July 22, 2008
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought that apes (simia, literally "the similar ones"), which in that time include monkeys and what we now call apes indifferently, were distinct from humans in every meaningful way. As Cicero said after citing Ennius, the character is different.
But then along came a Swedish botanist turned generalist, Carolus Linnaeus, in the 18th century, and despite being a creationist, he put apes,…
evolvingthoughts | July 21, 2008
Today I got my manuscript off to the publisher. Heaven knows what the editors will do with it; I expect a sympathetic treatment as the publisher's editorial board are quite keen. But it's like having a ten year boil lanced. And seeing a favourite child graduate. All at once.
So it remains for me to thank the enormous number of people who have helped me do this book. Nobody could have done it alone. I am amazed and heartened by the fact that no matter how much disagreement I may have with the various people involved in the species debate, they are all hell of a nice lot of guys and gals.…
evolvingthoughts | July 17, 2008
Stealing this one from Moselio Schachter:
A guy walks at night on a beach in California and stubs his toe against an old bottle, which breaks and releases a genie. “I’ll grant you one wish, oh Master,” says the genie.
The man replies, “Well, I'd dearly love to go to Hawaii but I hate both airplanes and ships, so would you build me a highway from here to there?” The genie thinks for a moment, then replies, “Indeed, I said you could have one wish, but this one seems nearly impossible. Could you ask for something easier?"
The man, being a microbiological sort, says, “OK, can you then tell me…
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2008Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason.
There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution - Problems with Science for more.
Jesse Prinz has an essay on atheism and morality, which I think jumps the shark at the end (how can there be atheist charities? Atheism is the lack of some belief, so any charity that doesn't make theism part of its core mission already is atheist), here at…
evolvingthoughts | June 17, 2008
One of the most important documents published in zoology in the 19th century was in fact a rather mundane one: The Strickland Code:
Hugh. E. Strickland, John Phillips, John Richardson, Richard Owen, Leonard Jenyns, William J. Broderip, John S. Henslow, William E. Shuckard, George R. Waterhouse, William Yarrell, Charles R. Darwin, and John O. Westwood, "Report of a Committee Appointed "To Consider of the Rules by Which the Nomenclature of Zoology May Be Established on a Uniform and Permanent Basis"," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1842, 1843: 105-21.…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2008
A blog that I have just come across is Deric Bownds' Mindblog. He covers issues of standard and evolutionary psychology and is well worth reading. One of his posts is this: Social heirarchy, stress, and diet, in which he presents recent evidence that stressed primates (in this case humans) eat lower quality, high sugar and high starch, food (crisps and M&Ms).
Why? I can think of several reasons. One is that this gives immediate energy release to deal with the stressors. But what if you are constantly stressed, by, say, being of low status on the social dominance hierarchy? Then you…
evolvingthoughts | June 7, 2008
The final of my comments on this topic (see one and two here) addresses the question whether or not there is a rank of species.
Once I had a paper knocked back by a reviewer in which I argued that there was nothing unique to being species. This became my 2003 paper. The reviewer said that the paper failed to accept that there was a "grade of organisation" in biology that comprised species. This was not surprising as the paper argued that no such grade existed (and I was able to convince the editor that this was a decent argument to make). However, many biologists are convinced such a rank…
evolvingthoughts | June 4, 2008
This is a kind of scattered post on a few things that have caught my eye, while I am avoiding boring work.
Paeloblog reports that a paper in Nature has done a phylogeny on continuous rather than discrete characters, using morphometric criteria to do a hominin phylogeny. This is not the first such attempt to use continuous characters in cladistics, and I would be interested if those who understand this topic comment on this attempt. It seems to me that the main difference between discrete and continuous data would be that the continua are an ordered set of otherwise discrete data points, so…
evolvingthoughts | June 2, 2008
So, in the last episode, you'll recall that the dastardly villain "theory" has relinquished its grip on species in a cliffhanger. But that raises a few questions. What, for instance, is it to be a theoretical object?
Traditionally, something was a theoretical object, that is, an object that was only theoretical, if it was something that the theory required or employed but which was not empirically ascertainable. Examples were "electron" c1920, "gene" prior to 1952, and perhaps still "Higgs boson" for reasons that I do not understand. But this is a positivist sense of theory - a formal…
evolvingthoughts | May 31, 2008
MOUSEBENDER: Good Morning.WENSLEYDALE: Good morning, sir. Welcome to the National Cheese Emporium.MOUSEBENDER: Ah, thank you my good man.WENSLEYDALE: What can I do for you, sir?MOUSEBENDER: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on Thurmond Street just now, skimming through History of the Inductive Sciences by William Whewell, and I suddenly came over all peckish.WENSLEYDALE: Peckish, sir?MOUSEBENDER: Esurient.WENSLEYDALE: Eh?MOUSEBENDER: (In a broad Yorkshire accent) Eee I were all hungry, like.WENSLEYDALE: Ah, hungry.MOUSEBENDER: In a nutshell. And I thought to myself, 'a little…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2008
If somebody asked me to write a short essay giving an overview of my favourite topic, the nature of species, I doubt that I could. I can write a long essay on it (in fact, several) but it would be excruciatingly hard to write a short one. For that, we need a real writer. Carl Zimmer is the guy. He has an essay on species in the current edition of Scientific American. And despite quoting some obscure Australian philosopher, it is a good summary of the issues. How he manages to get up on a topic like that amazes me. It took me a good five years.
There's a connection with this blog. A while…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here>
Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much other than an interest in new species underpinning it for all that there were a slew of experts involved in the choice, so I fail to see what the Bleiman Bros. are bitching about. Just like lists of the Best Songs of All Time, beauty and significance lie in the eyes of the beholder. What is significant is that thousands of new species were named and…
evolvingthoughts | May 26, 2008
One of the things about having one's own blog is that one gets to say what sorts of behaviours are acceptable by commenters. My commenters are generally a pretty nice bunch of people, often clever (hey, they read me) and polite even as the issues get hot. Occasionally, one is not. When this happens, the commenter gets warned, and if they really don't get it, banned. For the first time this has happened. Even odder, it's not a creationist, but a fanatic of another stripe: Mats Enval, the anticladist. Enval's modus operandi consisted of making assertions about how illogical cladism, or…
evolvingthoughts | May 24, 2008
Nothing is more excruciating to me than to see myself and hear myself. It's even worse when I'm up against someone who presents so much better than I do. So watch Paul Myers (I think that's how they spell his name) and me talk about Stuff at Bloggingheads.TV. The video is terrible (that's my fault; we should have recorded our own video and sent it to the editors, instead we recorded each other by way of an Australia-USA link that was routed, I fear, via Mongolia and Finland, using packets carried by mules). I'm out of sync. But it doesn't matter - it's voice with some moving pictures, that's…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2008
If scientists working in biology or a related field like psychology want to get attention, they will say something like this: Darwin was wrong, or made a mistake, or is insufficient to explain X, where X is whatever they are researching. It makes them seem to be proposing something important, because everybody agrees Darwin proposed something that changed our way of looking at life and ourselves. If we are saying he was wrong, a "paradigm shift" cannot be far behind...
So a paper entitled "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds" is a surefire…