Category: evolution

Few creatures stir the imagination like the coelacanth. Scientists thought it had been extinct for millions of years, and then in the 1930s, a specimen seemed to have swum from the Devonian right into a fisherman’s net.

Now scientists have finally sequenced the genome of this elusive, primitive looking creature to find out how slowly it’s really evolved, and to discern its relationship to those fish that dragged themselves onto land and became our ancestors. The news was announced in a paper in Nature.

At the LA Times, Eryn Brown covered the advance in this story, which told us that it was difficult to get DNA from this highly endangered fish but not how they finally did it. How does one go about getting a DNA sample from a five-...

A handful of pieces that ran last week describing the first proof of “reverse evolution” were so confusing and odd that I had to send them to some biologists I know for a reality check.

What I found weird was that the pieces described the loss of a previously adaptive trait as some sort of shocker. In this latest case, scientists from the University of Michigan found that dust mites had gone from being parasitic to free-living, the change allegedly being surprising because the parasitic mites were thought to have evolved from a free-living ancestor.

The loss of a trait didn’t seems surprising to me, but maybe it was to biologists. It wasn't to the ones I consulted.    

Scientists have understood since Darwin that evolution is not an ascent up a ladder – it’s a process of adaptation to local environments (and some random drift.) The notion of “devolution” doesn’t make much sense in light of our...

It can't be terribly comfortable to take a seat at the base of the dinosaur tree, but that's where a newly described creature, Nyasasaurus parringtoni, seems to rest. It's not yet certain, but Nyasasaurus could be the oldest dinosaur ever found, pushing the dawn of the dinosaurs, thought to have occurred about 230 million years ago, back in time another 15 million years.

While this discovery is unlikely to make too many people change their lunch plans, it does suggest that "dinosaurs emerged in the wake of the largest mass extinction of all time — the crash that occurred around the transition from the Permian to the Triassic period about 252 million years ago," writes the dinosaur blogger Brian Switek in Nature. Whether or not this beast, about the size of a Labrador retriever, was truly a dinosaur, it "sits...

Somehow, Lee Alan Dugatkin persuaded Slate to run a long piece on Thomas Jefferson's minor obsession with the idea of Count George-Louis Leclerc Buffon, curator of the King’s Natural History Cabinet in France, that "because North America was a cold and wet clime, all species found there were weak, shriveled, and diminished—they were degenerate." It became known as Buffon's theory of new-world degeneracy.

Buffon, a scientist famous for his encyclopedia Histoire Naturelle, wrote 

that North America was a land of swamps, where life putrefied and rotted. Try to raise domesticated species—cattle, pigs, sheep, goats,...

Russian, Greek, Hindi, and English might not sound as though they have much in common; the Russian-English connection didn't do much to stop the Cold War. But of course they do: they are all part of what is known as the Indo-European group of languages. While the similarities among the languages were clear to linguists (if not terribly clear to the rest of us), researchers disagree over where and when these languages originated.

A study in published in Science today suggests that the language group arose in Anatolia, part of modern Turkey, more than 8,000 years ago.

In Nature, Alyssa Joyce explains how the researchers, neither of whom is a linguist, had earlier used the methods of genetics and evolutionary ecology to track relationships among words and...

In an appearance in May on Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Chris Mooney discussed, among other things, a new kind of denialism: Conservatives denying that there is a personality difference, a psychological difference, between liberals and conservatives. In other words, they are denying the science he covers in his most recent book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality. If conservatives admitted that we are all shaped at least in part by our personalities and our gut feelings, Mooney said on MSNBC, "we could agree that we all have strengths and weaknesses, and then we would just say, you know, some people are good at this, some people are good at that. You're not inherently better. You're not inherently worse. And then, actually, you may have a ground for cooperation."

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It's a classic response of some editors to assume that if the liberals are saying one thing, and the conservatives another, that the truth lies somewhere in between. Where this doctrine comes from is a mystery. Where is it written that liberals or conservatives cannot sometimes be right? Or mostly right? Or completely wrong?

This is one version of a problem that Chris Mooney, our most prominent and adept critic of the political abuse of science, addresses in a post on his newly transplanted blog. Mooney's science and policy commentaries are now appear on a blog called Science Progress, part of the blog family of the liberal Center for American Progress. And he has...