Chicken, archosaur…same difference

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My daughter is learning about evolution in high school right now, and the problem isn’t with the instructor, who is fine, but her peers, who complain that they don’t see the connections. She mentioned specifically yesterday that the teacher had shown a cladogram of the relationships between crocodilians, birds, and mammals, and that a number of students insisted that there was no similarity between a bird and an alligator.

I may have to send this news article to school with her: investigators have found that a mutation in chickens causes them to develop teeth—and the teeth resemble those of the common ancestor of alligators and chickens, an archosaur.

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It’s not just the genes, it’s the links between them

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Once upon a time, I was one of those nerds who hung around Radio Shack and played about with LEDs and resistors and capacitors; I know how to solder and I took my first old 8-bit computer apart and put it back together again with “improvements.” In grad school I was in a neuroscience department, so I know about electrodes and ground wires and FETs and amplifiers and stimulators. Here’s something else I know: those generic components in this picture don’t do much on their own. You can work out the electrical properties of each piece, but a radio or computer or stereo is much, much more than a catalog of components or a parts list.

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Electronics geeks know the really fun stuff starts to happen when you assemble those components into circuits. That’s where the significant work lies and where the actual function of the device is generated—take apart your computer, your PDA, your cell phone, your digital camera and you’ll see similar elements everywhere, and the same familiar components you can find in your Mouser catalog. As miniaturization progresses, of course, more and more of that functionality is hidden away in tiny integrated circuits…but peel away the black plastic of those chips, and you again find resistors and transistors and capacitors all strung together in specific arrangements to generate specific functions.

We’re discovering the same thing about genomes.

The various genome projects have basically produced for us a complete parts list—a catalog of bits in our toolbox. That list is incredibly useful, of course, and represents an essential starting point, but how a genome produces an organism is actually a product of the interactions between genes and gene products and the cytoplasm and environment, and what we need next is an understanding of the circuitry: how Gene X expression is connected to Gene Y expression and what the two together do to Gene Z. Some scientists are suggesting that an understanding of the circuitry of the genome is going to explain some significant evolutionary phenomena, such as the Cambrian explosion and the conservation of core genetic processes.

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Welcome, toad overlords

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In yet another example of evolution in action, investigators have documented morphological changes in the cane toads (Bufo marinus) that infest parts of Australia. They’re an invasive species that was introduced in a misbegotten attempt to control beetles that were damaging the sugar cane crop; as it turns out, they are aggressive predators that eat lots of other native fauna, and they secrete toxins that kill animals that try to eat them.

Another feature that contributes to their unwanted success is their rapid dispersal. Individuals can move up to 1.8km per night, occupying new territory at a distressing pace. In the 70 years since they were introduced, they’ve taken over a million square kilometers of Australia. Since dispersal into virgin territories is a significant advantage for the toads, it was predicted that there would be selection for faster migration rates in the population. The authors have several lines of evidence to show that this is the case.

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Eldredge on Darwin

Niles Eldredge has a fine essay online on what it means to be a Darwinist (not the term as caricatured by creationists, but merely as someone who respects the work of Darwin while acknowledging the vast increase in understanding evolution since his time). It’s also useful for explaining how creationists distort the concept of punctuated equilibrium.

The creationists of the day got into the act as well. In a clear demonstration of how thoroughly political the creationist movement has always been in the United States, Ronald Reagan told reporters, after addressing a throng of Christian ministers during the 1980 presidential campaign, that evolution “is a theory, a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed.” The creationist who managed to get to Reagan’s handlers later bragged to me that those scientists in question were none other than Gould and me. The syllogism ran something like this: (1) Darwin said that evolution is slow, steady, and gradual; (2) some scientists say that evolution consists of rapid bursts of change interrupting vastly longer periods of evolutionary stagnation; ergo, (3) some scientists don’t follow Darwin, meaning (4) some scientists oppose evolution. Then, as now, at least in the public domain, “Darwin” is code for “evolution.” The two are virtual synonyms.

Ain’t that the truth. Darwin is not synonymous with evolution, however, which is why I reject the term “Darwinist” myself. But even so, I’m with Eldredge on this matter: Darwin was an excellent writer and scientist, and his work was the foundation for modern biology.

But I never thought the fact that Darwin—from where I stand as a paleontologist—got some of his story wrong somehow made me an anti-Darwinian. For I have admired the man ever since I took my paperback copy of the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species to read while waiting for Louis Leakey to show up and give a lecture on human evolution on the Columbia campus. I had arrived early to get a good seat, and Louis was late—so I got my first real chance to sample Darwin’s prose. I was fearful of the complexity of the great man’s mind, and of the alien nature of his Victorian prose. But I needn’t have worried, for Darwin proved accessible to the readers of his day—even lay readers—and he remains so today.

Where will I be today?

This afternoon, I’ll be at the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus, celebrating the birth of Charles Darwin. Everyone is welcome, so come on down!

Events:
1:00P – Lecture by historian of biology Professor Mark Borrello, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, on the history of Darwin and evolutionary theory.

2:00P – Lecture by biologist and blogger Professor P.Z. Myers, University of Minnesota—Morris, on evidence for evolution.

3:00P – Panel discussion of University of Minnesota evolutionary biologists on their cutting-edge research at the U of M titled “My Life’s Work in Three Minutes”. To be followed by a cake reception.

Charles Darwin achieved fame and infamy for his theory of evolution by natural selection, now the foundation underlying all biological sciences. Darwin Day is the anniversary of his birthday, whose exact date is February 12, 1809. The date is celebrated internationally.

For more information, contact:
Mike Jones
Publishing and Editing Committee Manager
Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists

Bell Museum of Natural History (Directions|Google Map)

Mmmmm-mmm. Cake. You can’t possibly miss this.

Guanlong wucaii

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a, b, Cranial reconstruction in left lateral (a; shaded area indicates the unpreserved portion) and dorsal (b) views. adc, anterodorsal concavity; al, anterior lamina; an, angular; aof, antorbital fenestra; d, dentary; dg, dentary groove; emf, external mandibular fenestra; en, external naris; if, infratemporal fenestra; isf, foramen on ischium; j, jugal; jp, pneumatic jugal foramen; l, lacrimal; m, maxilla; mc I–IV, metacarpals I–IV; mo, maxillary opening; mt I–V, metatarsals I–V; mvc, median vertical crest; nc, nasal crest; obf, obturator foramen; orb, orbit; pf, prefrontal; pfe, pneumatic fenestra; pl, posterior lamina; pm, premaxilla; po, postorbital; pr, pneumatic recess; qj, quadratojugal; ri, right ilium; ris, right ischium; rp, right pubis; sa, surangular; sac, sacrum; sc, sagittal crest; sec, semilunate carpal; sq, squamosal; tp, tubercle on pubis; tr, transverse ridge. Scale bar: 5 cm

Well, I was going to put together more about this beautiful new basal tyrannosauroid from the Jurassic of China, Guanlong wucaii, but Carl Zimmer beat me to it. I’ll just show you that lovely crested skull, and below the fold, a picture of the fossil in situ, and let Carl do the hard work of explaining it all.

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Evolution of a polyphenism

Here’s some very cool news: scientists have directly observed the evolution of a complex, polygenic, polyphenic trait by genetic assimilation and accommodation in the laboratory. This is important, because it is simultaneously yet another demonstration of the fact of evolution, and an exploration of mechanisms of evolution—showing that evolution is more sophisticated than changes in the coding sequences of individual genes spreading through a population, but is also a consequence of the accumulation of masked variation, synergistic interactions between different alleles and the environment, and perhaps most importantly, changes in gene regulation.

Unfortunately, it’s also an example of some extremely rarefied terminology that is very precisely used in genetic and developmental labs everywhere, but probably makes most people’s eyes glaze over and wonder what the fuss is all about. I’ll try to give a simple introduction to those peculiar words, and explain why the evolution of a polyphenic pigment pattern in a caterpillar is a fascinating and significant result.

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More Koufax nominations!

I’ve got a couple of posts that have been nominated for The 2005 Koufax Awards: Best Post, so I’ve quickly brought them on board here at the new site. Voting isn’t yet open, but here they are:

  • Idiot America. This one is something of a howl of anguish, and it’s really more a lot of quotes from Charles Pierce’s article of the same name in Esquire. If this gets the nomination, credit should go more to Pierce than to me—and that’s OK.
  • Planet of the Hats. This article is probably the best representation for how I actually feel about religion. It’s all metaphor, but if you don’t get it, I won’t be surprised…it means you’re really, really, ummm, devout.
  • The proper reverence due those who have gone before. I have to say, if one of these three gets the nomination, this is the one I’d personally favor. But hey, you’re all supposed to vote for your favorite, and there are about 220 other great choices there, too. Anyway, if you want to understand why I despise creationists of all stripes, this article might help you understand why.

The proper reverence due those who have gone before

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Some people might think I’m a rather morbid fellow. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate lackey at the University of Washington and working at the med school, there, I made a wonderful discovery one lunch hour: a bone room. Tucked away in an odd corner of the building was a room full of shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, each one containing the bones of some individual who’d left their remains to science. They’d been thoroughly cleaned and disarticulated, and many had parts sawed apart so you could peer into the sinuses or the hollow spaces for marrow or poke around in the caverns of the cranium. It became my favorite quiet, private place. I could putter about reassembling someone, or just contemplate some scrap of bone for a Yorick moment.

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