This little beauty is an artist’s rendition of a Placoderm – an extinct fish from close to 500 million years ago which had a significant feature that has played out into the lives of all humans today. Early fishes from this geological period had jaws, and evolutionary scientists have recognized jawed vertebrate fish as the […]
The Extinct Placoderm and Adaptive Immune Systems Read More »
Human evolution shows that Homo Sapiens evolved physical features suitable to long-distance running. About two million years ago, the east African landscape entered a drying period, and many forested lands turned into grasslands or patchy open woodlands. These conditions would have favored our ancestors’ development of characteristics that could run after animals and scavenge prey
Human Evolution for Long Distance Running Read More »
You are not looking at a LGBTQ pride rainbow after a drinking binge. Nope, instead this image is an artistic representation of a type of nucleic acid arrangement called a RIBOZYME, and it perhaps is key to understanding some of the earliest history of all: the history of the origins of life.We learned in Middle
Nucleic Acid Ribozyme Arrangement Read More »
Wait: this looks like a science post, but it is really history! Very long-time ago history, like 160 million years ago. But, due to the science of evolutionary genetics, we know this very old story is of immediate relevance to every human, as well as to a very special virus that made our lives possible.Our
Genomes of Our DNA Read More »
Alright, my brainy friends: it won’t take you but a New York minute to look at this diagram and figure out what’s wrong here.That’s right! The earth is in the middle of the entire universe, and of course we know that’s just silly. But such was the model of the cosmos bequeathed by the Ancient
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Although other scientists are more famous for getting the astronomical idea of heliocentrism correct, Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) was much more successful than his peers at explaining super important aspects of our solar system (for instance, the planets go round the sun in ellipses). Who would have thought that a driving force behind his significant
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So here’s a question for you – will the sun rise tomorrow? I think so, and you do as well (hopefully), but this man showed that you couldn’t prove it. Not with logic, anyway.You are looking at David Hume (d. 1776), one of the most important philosophers ever. A skeptic and a naturalist, Hume praised
The Evidence-Based Knowledge of David Hume Read More »
Here come two points about human evolution – the first is one that I imagine is not surprising to you, but the second may be, and might make you wince.First, the animal in this photo is not an ancestor of us Homo Sapiens. We did not evolve from apes but share a common progenitor that
Junk DNA and Our Common Ancestors Read More »
When does the story of Alice actually intersect with rabbits? In the case of evolutionary history — and a failed attempt at biological warfare in Australia.I can think of nothing that demonstrates the process of biological evolution more clearly than viruses. Because their genomes are so small, their genetic mutation rates produce a rapid effect.
“The Red Queen Hypothesis” in European Rabbits Read More »
This picture is neither a coffee stain nor a bad tattoo, but rather a fossil from one of the most important places that evolutionary scientists study the emergence of complex life: the fossils of Burgess Shale in British Columbia.Burgess Shale fossils date from the period of the Cambrian Explosion (525-505 million years ago), when “all
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Evolution brings a sense of humility like nothing else can. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to our ancestors? Featured on the first slide is “Kimberella,” probably the oldest of the “protostome” fossils, dating 255 million years ago – from before the pre-Cambrian explosion.“Aha,” you might be thinking. “That doesn’t look like even the
Kimberella – the Oldest Protostome Fossil Read More »
Here is a picture of two of the most famous hands in art history, and they go along with a not-very-famous but super important story about how human hands evolved.“Nature does not invent very often completely from scratch,” writes evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll, “rather, it remodels its existing structures with took kit genes that
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“The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind,” wrote Charles Darwin, in his famous _The Descent of Man_ in 1871. And evolutionary biologists still agree. So then what makes the mental capacities of Homo Sapiens and other hominid apes so different?Two
Brain Size in Homo Sapiens Read More »
Wanna know the difference between this kid and a chimpanzee? So do evolutionary biologists . . . And with the use of genetic studies, scientists recently have figured out two additional ways that we Homo Sapiens differ from our common primate chimp ancestors from six to eight million years ago. They have to do with
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Evolutionary history is the focus of my posts for a while, and what better place to start than CRISPR? Last week, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna’s work in using CRISPR for gene editing made news headlines – this is the first time the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two women. The future
CRISPR Gene and The Nobel Prize in Chemistry Read More »
This is St. George Jackson Mivart, and he ruffled the feathers of proponents of every side of the evolution debates of the 19th century. The second slide is a fossil of a ancient species called Archaeopteryx, and its ruffled feathers were at the center of evolutionary debates of the 19th century.Mivart was raised Anglican but
St. George Jackson Mivart and the Archaeopteryx Read More »
This is Marie-Claire King (born 1946), and just reading about her accomplishments makes me tired. Besides earning her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, she has six other honorary doctorates in science from the most prestigious universities in the world. From her work in discovering the genetic foundations of breast cancer, schizophrenia, and hearing loss, to her
Marie-Claire King and Genetic Studies Read More »
A few days ago I did a post featuring a fossil of a creature called Archaeopteryx, famed for having traits both bird- and dinosaur- like: it filled in a gap in the evolutionary record. The photo you see here is of the paleo-biologist Neil Shubin with a model of a creature whose fossils he found.
Neil Shubin and the Tiktaalik Read More »
Historians are frequently enchanted by things discarded as useless by the general public. But I think anyone interested in evolution would find the study of non-gene coding DNA fascinating, including the scientist featured here. This is Susumu Ohno, one of the United States’ foremost geneticists and evolutionary biologists, and he came up with the term
Susumu Ohno’s “Junk DNA” Read More »
“The Persistence of Memory” is one of artist Salvador Dali’s most recognizable paintings. The surrealist style is perfectly adapted to depicting the ways our minds preserve our memories — they are suggestive, dreamlike, warpable. For however imperfect or relativistic our memories might be, we owe them for much of our sense of identity.How we humans
Salvador Dali and the Arc Gene Read More »
