Human ancestor 1.2 million-years-old found: The remains of human ancestors who lived around 1.2 million years ago have been unearthed in Spain. [Telegraph]
Evolving the Wow! Factor: Adaptation is the “wow!” factor of nature: when we see something spectacular or exquisite, we are typically looking at an adaptation. And what underpins adaptation is the appearance and spread of beneficial mutations: the process is not possible without them. [NYT]
Sluggish Reptile Breaks Speedy Evolution Record: One of the world’s most laid-back animals, the tuatara, may be the fastest evolving creature on Earth, according to a paper in this month’s Trends in Genetics. The lizard-like reptile’s DNA changes naturally at a rate faster than has been observed in any other animal: 1.56 changes per nucleotide (DNA subunit) every million years. [Discovery]
March 28th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.
Fossil sheds light on the history of sex: A long, thin rope-like creature standing erect on the sea floor up to 570 million years ago has been identified as the first animal on Earth to have had sex. [Times]
New Analysis Suggests Earlier Start for Upright Walking: As early as six million years ago, apparently close to the beginning of the human lineage, an ancestral species had already developed the transforming ability for upright walking, scientists reported on Thursday. [NYT]
Got milk? That’s an evolutionary plus: DNA ‘clock’ points to when mammals shifted away from egg-laying. [MSNBC]
March 21st, 2008 at 10:44 am
This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.
The Neanderthal-Human Split: (Very) Ancient History: Neanderthals and humans once shared a common ancestor, but we split from the stocky, hairy hominid group as long as 400,000 to 350,000 years ago, concludes a new study. [Discovery]
In Britain, creationist theory is evolving: After the Sunday service in Westminster Chapel, where worshipers were exhorted to wage “the culture war” in the World War II spirit of Sir Winston Churchill, cabbie James McLean delivered his verdict on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. “Evolution is a lie, and it’s being taught in schools as fact, and it’s leading our kids in the wrong direction,” said McLean, chatting outside the chapel. “But now people like Ken Ham are tearing evolution to pieces.” [LA Times]
Culture Speeds Up Human Evolution: Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place. [Scientific American]
March 18th, 2008 at 11:40 am
This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.
Stop the Mutants!: I’m going to wave a magic wand and reduce the mutation rate to zero, instantly, in all species, and forever. Then I’m going to watch to see how long it takes for evolution to stop. [NYT]
Discovery Challenges Finding of a Separate Human Species: More bones of unusually small-bodied people who lived long ago have been found on another Pacific island, and some scientists say this calls into question claims that the first such specimens, from Indonesia, represent a separate human species. [NYT]
March 12th, 2008 at 9:05 am
This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.
Evolution’s Most Effective Killer - Snake Venom: As predators, snakes are missing a few key attributes. They have no legs to chase down their prey, no paws to knock down quarry, and no claws to hold their victims. But none of these deficiencies matters much, because evolution has handed snakes the ultimate weapon: venom. With it, the several hundred types of venomous snakes can kill or debilitate before their victims escape. [Popsci]
Comb jellies were our first ancestor: Instead, it reveals that our true ancient ancestor, which emerged more than 600 million years ago, was the comb jelly or Ctenophore - common and extremely fragile jellies with well-developed tissues - which appear to have diverged from other animals even before the sponge, which has no tissue to speak of. [Telegraph]
March 7th, 2008 at 10:05 am
This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.
But the lives of spotted hyenas, she has concluded, share some profound similarities with our own. In both species, a complex social world has driven the evolution of a big, complex brain. [NYT]
As I mentioned in the first installment of this series, mutations are the raw material for evolution, the ultimate source of innovation: without them, eyes could not get keener, nor feathers snazzier. Yet mutations are also a product of evolution. Which is to say, the rate at which you have mutations is a trait like any other — height, bushiness of eyebrows, number of tentacles and so on — and like any other trait, it can, and does, evolve. [NYT]
March 5th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.
“We found very many human genes undergoing selection,” says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million DNA sequences* showing the most variation. “Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years.” [Scientific American]
Primitive feathers that represent a key missing link in their evolution have been found, fossilised in 100-million-year-old amber from France. [Telegraph]
State education officials voted to add evolution to the required course work in public schools, but only after a last-minute change depicting Darwin’s seminal work as merely a theory. [NYT]
A study of ancient canoes has backed the idea that human culture is as much subject to the forces of evolution as human genes, so that harmful and unsustainable cultures may face extinction [Telegraph].
February 24th, 2008 at 9:06 am
This article is filed under Blog, Evolution.
