The Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine is an embarrassment. Its director, Dr. Andrew Weil, is a quack.
Let me get this out of the way first: I know Dr. Weil gives a lot of good advice. He also advises a lot of nonsense. A doctor who advises his patients to get their chakras aligned is a quack. A doctor who advises his patients to eat a healthy diet, get more exercise, quit smoking, and get their chakras aligned is still a quack.
Hisayoshi Nozaki and colleagues have done it again: in a new PLoS One article, they have described yet another new species of Volvox, V. reticuliferus (see also “Volvox 2015: taxonomy, phylogeny, & ecology“):
Figure 1A from Nozaki et al. 2015: Surface view of asexual Volvox reticuliferus spheroids.
Minor spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen Europa Report (and you should), this video will reveal part of the plot.
This is a test post, with no real content.
In my post about coin flips (“No, the Patriots aren’t magically controlling coin tosses“), I used a truly silly workaround (MS Equation Editor –> pdf –> jpeg) to insert some math in the post, resulting in this:
Remember the flap about a German scientist restricting the license to his software (Treefinder) to protest European immigration policies? Not a great idea if your software is published in an open access journal.
Gangolf Jobb cut off licensing of his program to European countries he considered too welcoming to immigrants. Last week, BMC Evolutionary Biology published a retraction of the 2004 article that introduced Treefinder, citing their policy on software availability:
They shouldn’t be.
Image from USA Today.
Citing a CBS article, Uncommon Descent complains “No design inference allowed on coin flips.” As I’ve come to expect from them, it’s pretty hard to parse a coherent argument out of the article, but I’ll bet it has something to do with 747s and tornadoes (say what you want about Evolution News and Views; at least you can follow their arguments). So it’s not clear what design inference they think we should draw from the New England Patriots winning 19 of 25 coin flips, nor who is being prevented from drawing it.
Volvox ovalis, strain NIES-2569.
Volvox ovalis by Matthew Herron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Volvox ovalis was described by Hisayoshi Nozaki and Annette Coleman in 2011 from a strain collected near College Station, Texas. Colonies are often distinctly egg-shaped, up to 450 µm long, with 1000-2000 somatic cells and 8-12 gonidia. A member of the section Merrillosphaera, it is closely related to V. tertius and V. spermatosphaera:
Snowflake yeast, with apoptotic cells in red.
As part of their series on “Life’s Big Leaps,” Quanta Magazine has published an article about Will Ratcliff’s snowflake yeast research (“Life’s Secrets Sought in a Snowflake“).
Volvox africanus (from Herron et al. 2010)
The worst-kept secret among Volvox researchers is that the current volvocine taxonomy is a train wreck. Within the largest family, the Volvocaceae, five nominal genera are polyphyletic (Pandorina, Volvulina, Eudorina, Pleodorina, and Volvox). Of the remaining three, two are monotypic (Platydorina and Yamagishiella). Only the newly described Colemanosphaera is monophyletic with more than one species. The extent of the problem was suspected long before it was confirmed by molecular phylogenetics, and ad hoc attempts to deal with it have led to the existence of such taxonomic abominations as ‘sections,’ ‘formas,’ and ‘syngens.’ An overhaul is called for, but it is complicated by the aforementioned loss of type cultures.
Aphids on dandelion. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.
Previously, I introduced Beckett Sterner’s new paper comparing and critically evaluating the views of Ellen Clarke and Peter Godfrey-Smith on biological individuality. For Clarke, individuality is recognized by the presence of ‘individuating mechanisms’: traits that increase the capacity for among-unit selection or decrease the capacity for within-unit selection. Godfrey-Smith recognizes different kinds of individuals, but at a minimum, populations of individuals must have Lewontin’s criteria of phenotypic variation, differential fitness, and heritability of fitness, i.e. be capable of adaptive change.
