Recently in Biology Category

A committee appointed by the Texas Board of Education is reviewing state science standards. Three of the six members of the committee are creationists.

Center for Inquiry and The Clergy Letter Project are secular and religious communities who have come together to protect our children's future in science. We call on you to help defend science education.

Center for Inquiry and The Clergy Letter Project co-sponsor Teach Them Science, a web site providing information about evolution, science, and science education. Center for Inquiry is a secular organization.¹ The Clergy Letter Project includes scientists and clergy who recognize that science and religious believe can be compatible.²

Such a collaboration is a welcome development; as Frederick Crews noted in his book Follies of the Wise, "... the anticreationist cause in the US would be doomed without the help of Christians who are favorably inclined toward the teaching of evolution." It is thus a blessing that the Center for Inquiry and The Clergy Project have put aside their differences, which may at times be considerable, and agreed to collaborate on this important Web site. (Matt Young)

2009 is the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of his publication of On the origin of species. It's a sad commentary on the state of science education in the world that there are many people (and even a few scientists) who still don't understand the beauty, the power, and the unifying force of evolutionary theory. Darwin's fundamental insights -- that all living things are descended from a single common ancestor and that evolution by natural selection is responsible for organismal adaptation -- have been confirmed and reconfirmed for 150 years.

In an effort to help spread the word, Nature has compiled a list of 15 "evolutionary gems" published in that journal over the last ten years. As they put it in the announcement:

[T]he document summarizes 15 lines of evidence from papers published in Nature over the past 10 years. The evidence is drawn from the fossil record, from studies of natural and artificial habitats, and from research on molecular biological processes.

In a year in which Darwin is being celebrated amid uncertainty and hostility about his ideas among citizens, being aware of the cumulatively incontrovertible evidence for those ideas is all the more important. We trust that this document will help.

Evolutionary gems can be downloaded as a PDF from the Nature web site.

AIBS Adds YouTube Channel to its Free Online Collection of Lectures and Interviews

AIBS has added a YouTube Channel -- http://www.youtube.com/user/rogrady -- to its lineup of free online lectures and interviews with some of the world's most eminent biologists. Now online are 18 archival recordings from the year 2000 that include interviews with Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Gene Odum, and a remarkable conversation between Ernst Mayr and Michael Robinson, former director of the National Zoo in Washington DC.

We'll continue to add to the YouTube postings while we also continue to build the AIBS Media Library -- http://www.aibs.org/media-library/ -- which currently contains more than 70 plenary lectures recorded at AIBS Annual meetings from 2000 onwards, with audio, video, slides, and transcripts.  The themes of these meetings have been:

2008 - Climate, Environment, and Infectious Diseases
2007 - Evolutionary Biology and Human Health
2006 - Biodiversity: The Interplay of Science, Valuation, and Policy
2004 - Invasive Species: The Search for Solutions
2003 - Bioethics in a Changing World
2002 - Evolution: Understanding Life on Earth
2001 - From Biodiversity to Biocomplexity
2000 - Challenges for the New Millennium

With plenary speakers including:

Steven Aftergood * Bruce Alberts * Rustom Antia * Francisco Ayala * Ann Bartuska * Stephen Bocking * Richard Boohar * John Brown * Carlos Bustamante * James Carlton * Jamie Rappaport Clark * Rita Colwell * Kathryn Cottingham * Ellis Cowling * Joel Cracraft * Andrew Dobson * Paul Ehrlich * Niles Eldredge * Daniel Esty * Durland Fish * Ira Flatow * Howard Frumkin * Douglas Futuyma * Arturo Gomez-Pompa * Stephen Jay Gould * Peter Grant * Rosemary Grant * Eric Green * Duane J. Gubler * James E Hansen. * Stephen L. Hoffman * Edward Holmes * Daniel Janzen * Alison Jolly * Phillip Kitcher * Carl Leopold * Simon Levin * Gene Likens * David Lodge * Thomas Lovejoy * Jane Lubchenco * Paula Mabee * Richard Mack * David Magnus * Terry Maple * Lynn Margulis * Chris Mooney * Robert Morris * Stephen Morse * Randall Murch * Shahid Naeem * Randolph Nesse * Matthew C. Nisbet * Richard B Norgaard. * Martin Nowak * Gordon Orians * Stephen R. Palumbi * Stephen Polasky * Sandra Postel * Sir Ghillean Prance * Nancy Rabalais * Loren Rieseberg * Paul Risser * David Rogers * Kim Stanley Robinson * Eugenie C. Scott * Daniel Simberloff * Sarah Tishkoff * Marvalee Wake * Douglas C. Wallace * Edward Wilson * Joy Zedler

The next set of lectures to be added to the Media Library will be those from the 2009 AIBS Annual meeting, scheduled for 18 - 19 May in Washington DC, on the theme of Sustainable Agriculture: Greening the Global Food Supply.  Registration, poster submissions, and the preliminary program for this meeting are online at http://www.aibs.org/annual-meeting/annual_meeting_2009.html .

Contact: spotter@aibs.org

Biology is a very, very different discipline from the one I began to study thirty years ago when I started graduate school at Stanford.¹ Entire genomes are sequenced routinely where once we were lucky to know the sequence of a single gene. Theoreticians, like me, depended on computers in our research, but for everyone else the only time they used a computer was when they needed to do a complicated statistical analysis in SAS.² Now it's difficult to imagine any biologist surviving without a computer and an internet connection, whether downloading sequences from Genbank, inferring phylogenies,³, or inferring rates of gene flow, computers are an essential part of the modern biologists toolkit. Writing in Nature Genetics Lincoln Stein outlines a vision of the future for cyberinfrastructure in biology. The whole article is worth reading, but if you can't wait for the punchline, here it is:

This is an exciting time for biology. The projects that are now in progress or just getting under way point towards a future in which scientific collaborations will be unimpeded by geographic constraints or by limited access to data. Just as it is now inconceivable to do science without access to a personal computer and e-mail, in a decade the cyberinfrastructure will be an absolutely indispensable part of the biological researcher's equipment.

There have been many reports recently describing Colony Collapse Disorder in honeybees. What causes the dramatic collapse of honeybee colonies isn't clear. There is a report this morning from the Universität Koblenz-Landau that “bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried ... out [the study], said this could provide a ‘hint’ to a possible cause” (source).

It's possible, I suppose, but count me as skeptical. A summary of ideas behind the research sounds like gibberish to me. Maybe it's just because I don't know anything about insect physiology or the physiology of learning, but you be the judge.

Since the development of Cybernetics in the 1960s there has been an interdisciplinary view on the concept of "information". The research in mathematical information theory led to several applications in non-mathematical contexts.

In this paper we develop a model of effect based on the learning theory of super-signs, which deals with the well known phenomenon of chunking.

Our model describes to what extend high-frequency electromagnetic fields could influence the learning process of human beings. Furthermore we identify honey bees as a bioindicator, since their brain-structure concerning learning processes is similar to that of human beings. Because of their size, honey bees could be resonantly stimulated by the frequency of GSM mobile phones. As a consequence it is possible to study non-thermal effects on the learning process of these insects. Therefore the influence of non-thermal effects on the brain of human beings could also be identified.

So our experimental experience shows that honey bees are suitable for studying the influence of thermal and non-thermal effects on the learning process caused by high-frequency electromagnetic fields. In this context it should be a central task of Educational Informatics to apply an extended theory of super-signs. (source)

Massimo Pigliucci tries to dissolve the species problem in a recent essay in Philosophy Now. He suggests that we use Wittgenstein and regard “species“ as a cluster concept, one that is characterized by a loose network of interrelated concepts, rather than by a single defining feature. While attractive in some ways (it mirrors the kind of pluralism I championed in a Philosophy of Science paper I published in 1984) there are other ways in which the solution is unsatisfactory. Or rather, the approach Pigliucci suggests is promising, but it is also incomplete.