Category: Evolution
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Marmorkrebs: It’s neither nature nor nurture
I like the story of the marmorkrebs, a kind of crayfish that reproduces pathogenetically. Because of this, they’re genetically identical, so all of the many…
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An Old and Wild Absurdity: We keep making the wrong assumptions about evolution
Some ways of thinking about evolution and natural history don’t go away, no matter how forcefully they get refuted. In my dentist’s waiting room earlier…
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Anemones: They look like they’re from another planet
There are no better places than tide pools to find alien-like creatures. Sea anemones are predatory animals, but you wouldn’t know it looking at them.
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History and Function: Both are hallmarks of life, but history may be more important
Why something exists, and what it’s good for, are two different things. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty…
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Elephant Seals: Men should try not to be like them
Animals don’t exist as cautionary tales for humans, but if they did, elephant seals would’ve clearly been created to tell men how not to behave.…
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Shingles Vaccine and Dementia: Good news, but only because we got lucky
Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, is a viral disease that causes a painful rash as well as pain and general malaise. There is a…
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From Ole Worm to Christian Vibe
Slime Mold Time Mold, on their blog, mentions Ole Worm, a Danish Renaissance naturalist. In 1638, he was one of the first to recognize that…
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Genome Counter
The Human Genome project took 13 years and cost $3 billion. It was completed in 2003, although some gaps took until 2022 to be filled.…
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Causation Does Not Imply Variation
As everyone knows in the abstract but sometimes forgets in the heat of the moment, correlation does not imply causation. John Cochrane reminds us that…
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Kári Stefánsson
None of the encounters I’ve had with Kári Stefánsson have been pleasant. I remember taking a walk with him in Heidelberg many years ago, when…
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Wrangel Island Mammoths
For hundreds of years after the pyramids of Giza had been completed, mammoths still roamed Wrangel Island off the northern coast of Siberia. Around the…
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One Argument is Better than Two
People have to eat, and some of what they eat is meat. As with everything, there’s a tradeoff, in this case between animal welfare and…
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The Evolution of Everything
The Evolution of Everything isn’t Matt Ridley’s best book, but it has sections that are among the most thought-provoking writing I’ve come across. The theme…
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The Funny Side of Cancer
He – literally – dove into danger to study life’s mysteries, from the depths of the sea to the edge of the stars. His mind…
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Things Don’t Happen for a Reason
We want to know why. My career is built around finding the causes for rare diseases. Human genetics, the field I trained and work in,…
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Birds, Sex & Beauty
We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing […] If the lyric is simply “mine mine…
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Mammals are Prose; Birds are Poetry
It dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like the birds do and other…
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The Algernon Argument
If there were an intervention that would result in enhanced intelligence, why have we not already evolved that way? The answer is the Algernon argument.…
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Great Argus
Charles Darwin included an illustration of the feathers of the great argus pheasant in The Descent of Man. The pattern on great argus feathers seem…
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Selective Breeding for Longevity
In his Science Fiction novel Methuselah’s Children, Robert Heinlein described a clan whose members become unusually old without showing signs of frailty. They arrived there…
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Personality Transplants
A spooky phenomenon: People who receive heart transplants sometimes change in a way that makes them resemble the donor. In some cases, they seem to…
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Terminal Lucidity
People experiencing terminal lucidity have typically suffered from dementia for a long time. Often they are gone so far they can’t talk or recognize their…
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More on Assembly Theory
I recently posted on Assembly Theory. I’ve read up on it some more since then and found this review of the theory by philosopher Johannes…
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Amber Inclusions
Seeing a perfectly preserved insect that flew around some long-gone forest tens of millions years ago right in front of your eyes, right now in…
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Assembly Theory: A new way to think about evolutionary history
Assembly Theory (AT) is a way to think about evolution and complexity. It applies to organisms but can also be used to think about artifacts,…
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Meadows
This is a mountain meadow in Lower Austria. Comparable meadows in the Sierra Nevada have fewer wildflowers and fewer insects, both in terms of absolute…
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Drafts
According to a pervasive belief in the German-speaking world, it’s essential to avoid drafts. They cause all kinds of diseases, including muscle stiffness and colds.…
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Gabonionta
The Natural History Museum in Vienna has an exhibit on the Gabonionta, also known as Francevillian biota. They were multicellular organisms that appeared 2.1 billion…
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Doubting Twin Studies
As a statistical geneticist, I used to think that the heritability estimates from twin studies are broadly correct. They suggest that variance in traits like…
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Bees and Fish
Insects, for all their evolutionary success, aren’t smart. Take dragonflies for example. There are 3,000 extant species, so they’re doing alright, but they’re not geniuses:…
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Information Content of the Genome
On Asimov Press, Dynomight asks how information there is in DNA. How should we define the “information content” of DNA? I propose a definition I call the…
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Intelligence and Race
It’s hard to have a good faith discussion about human intelligence with anyone, especially about the genetics of intelligence. This 2019 blog post by Ewan…
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X and Y
It’s a remarkable coincidence that the X and Y chromosomes, named that way because those are the only letters that describe their shapes, sit together…
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We Invented Ourselves
We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention. Neither fire, the wheel, steam power, nor anti-biotics or AI is the greatest invention of…
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AI Benchmarking
A month ago, I observed that out of three big magazines dedicated to literature, none had a recent discussion of AI and what it means…
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Why We Die
In Why We Die, Venki Ramakrishnan looks at longevity, and whether there may be a way to extend it. I’ve talked with Ramakrishnan a few…
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Genetic Drift on Generation Ships
On Centauri Dreams, Alex Tolley writes about the challenges a generation ship would face. He mentions one potential problem that I find particularly interesting, even…
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Coalescence
Coalescent theory is a population genetics approach to reconstructing the history of populations. This paper by Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin applies an…
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Terraforming
Getting to Mars is hard and may take longer than we anticipate. Terraforming it in any meaningful way is going to be even harder and…
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Questions about Domestication
There are 3,900 species of mammals outside of rodents, yet we have only domesticated 15-20. Similarly, there are 12,000 species of grass, yet we have…
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Neanderthal News
Stone Age Herbalist lists what we have recently learned about Neanderthals. Here are the most interesting developments:
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AI in Biology
AI will soon design effective and safe drugs for any ailment. At least that’s commonly assumed, and on the surface it’s a reasonable prediction. After…
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A Great Time to Be Large
I’d have loved to see Pleistocene megafauna like the mammoth with my own eyes, and maybe one day I will. In the meantime, I am…
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The Sorcerer II
Around the time I was doing my PhD, J. Craig Venter was one of the most talked about scientists on the planet. At some point,…
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Life Prefers Ice
Robert Frost holds with those who say the world will end in fire. Freeman Dyson was agnostic on whether the world will end in fire…
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Our Biotech Future that Didn’t Happen
I once attended a week-long meeting in Heidelberg. The topic was Science and Society and the organizer was Sheila Jasanoff, an academic whose work focuses…
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The Coffee Ban
Swedes drink a lot of coffee, and at all times of the day. One of the few fragments of Swedish I remember from my time…
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California: Great for Trees
Why does California have the tallest, biggest and oldest trees? Coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are the tallest trees on Earth, reaching 116 meters. Their range…
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Give Chance a Chance
Heart disease, kidney disease and diabetes kill many of us and are highly heritable, yet identical twins rarely die of the same cause, even though…
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Where Is It Like to Be an Octopus?
Octopuses are the only smart invertebrate animals. Their brains are quite different from that of vertebrates like us: Rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated,…
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Other Minds
My five-year-old daughter said that spiders are insects and I was almost sure that they weren’t until she showed me a worksheet her kindergarten teacher…
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Arsenic for Longevity
In an essay first published in 1877 in Waldheimat, Austrian writer Peter Rosegger describes his encounter with peasants in Styria using arsenic as an anti-aging…
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Wanted: Time
So much universe, and so little time Terry Pratchett Here are three observations that’d I’d love to spend a few weeks to investigate further, spending…
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Against Epigenetics
In the 1960s, biologist James McConnell conditioned worms to respond to light flashes, then ground them up and fed them to other worms. He reported…
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Bionumbers
I’m a geneticist by profession, but too often, I realize that I don’t know some of the basic facts. How many RNA molecules are there…
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Coherence Tradeoffs
There is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage Jared Diamond…
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Adaptationism
The next time you’re in a room full of biologists and you want to start a shouting match, ask them about junk DNA. While everyone…
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Why Do We Like Music?
Why do we like the things we like? For some, such as food or sex, the answer is obvious. Without them, we wouldn’t survive or…
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Sunspots and Influenza
Fred Hoyle was an accomplished astronomer but also came up with a few controversial theories that didn’t take off, not that there’s anything wrong with…
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The Paleobiology Database
In every way (except responsiveness) superior to the map of California fossil sites I’ve previously made: https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/
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Of Ants and Men
The 2015 documentary Of Ants and Men (PBS) on Edward O. Wilson is beautiful. He was a biologist connected to nature not only intellectually but…
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Map of California Fossil Sites
I made an interactive map of California fossil sites based on data by Don Kenney.
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Improbable Destinies
Is there such a thing as destiny? How resilient are outcomes to changed starting conditions? This was the question that Stephen Jay Gould asked in…
Nehaveigur 