We change our enviroment without conscience that we can suicide ourselves.
Oceans Rising Faster Than UN Forecast, Scientists Say
By Alex Morales
June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Polar ice caps are melting faster and oceans are rising more than the United Nations projected just two years ago, 10 universities said in a report suggesting that climate change has been underestimated.
Global sea levels will climb a meter (39 inches) by 2100, 69 percent more than the most dire forecast made in 2007 by the UN’s climate panel, according to the study released today in Brussels. The forecast was based on new findings, including that Greenland’s ice sheet is losing 179 billion tons of ice a year.
“We have to act immediately and we have to act strongly,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters in the Belgian capital. “Time is clearly running out.”
In six months, negotiators from 192 nations will meet in Copenhagen to broker a new treaty to fight global warming by limiting the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests.
“A lukewarm agreement” in the Danish capital “is not only inexcusable, it would be reckless,” Schellnhuber said.
Fossil-fuel combustion in the world’s power plants, vehicles and heaters alone released 31.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, 1.8 percent more than in 2007, according to calculations from BP Plc data.
Look what response we get today
India Rejects Any Greenhouse-Gas Cuts Under New Climate Treaty
June 30 (Bloomberg) -- India said it will reject any new treaty to limit global warming that makes the country reduce greenhouse-gas emissions because that will undermine its energy consumption, transportation and food security.
Cutting back on climate-warming gases is a measure that instead must be taken by industrialized countries, and India is mobilizing developing nations to push that case, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told the media today in New Delhi.
“India will not accept any emission-reduction target -- period,” Ramesh said. “This is a non-negotiable stand.”
India, which has more than 800 million people living on less than $2 a day, is talking with Brazil, China and South Africa on taking a common stand in international negotiations that richer countries like the U.S. and Britain must reduce their emissions 45 percent by the year 2020 from 1990 levels.
Tuesday 30 June 2009
Monday 29 June 2009
Alfred Russell Wallace and his merit
Forgotten evolutionist lives in Darwin's shadow
By MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer
Mon Jun 29, 4:21 am ET
SANTUBONG, Malaysia – As he trudges past chest-high ferns and butterflies the size of saucers, George Beccaloni scours a jungle hilltop overlooking the South China Sea for signs of a long-forgotten Victorian-era scientist.
He finds what he's looking for: an abandoned, two-story guest house, its doors missing and ceiling caved in.
"Excellent. This is the actual spot," he yells.
It is on this site, in a long-gone thatched hut, that Alfred Russel Wallace is believed to have spent weeks in 1855 writing a seminal paper on the theory of evolution. Yet he is largely unknown outside scientific circles today, overshadowed by Charles Darwin, whom most people credit as the father of a theory that explains the origins of life through how plants and animals evolve.
Now, in the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, a growing number of academics and amateur historians are rediscovering Wallace. Their efforts are raising debate over exactly what Wallace contributed to the theory of evolution, and what role, if any, the spiritual world plays in certain aspects of natural selection.
Beccaloni, a 41-year-old British evolutionary biologist with London's Natural History Museum, is on a quest to return Wallace to what he sees as his rightful place in history. He and Fred Langford Edwards, a British artist making an audiovisual project about Wallace, are retracing the scientist's eight-year trip around Southeast Asia.
Unlike Wallace, Darwin spent two decades developing his theory of natural selection and had far more evidence to back it up, as presented in his defining work, "The Origin of Species," published 150 years ago. But Wallace reached the same conclusion before Darwin published his findings, and Beccaloni contends that Wallace deserves equal billing.
"The Darwin industry is what has distorted the whole of history," Beccaloni said. "People have just concentrated on Darwin and his life and work but they fail to see Darwin wasn't alone and he fits into a wider picture."
Wallace, a British beetle and bird collector, set off for Singapore in 1854. Eight years and 14,000 miles (23,000 kilometers) later, he returned to England as one of the most celebrated biologists after Darwin.
Often traveling with a lone assistant and enduring monsoons and malaria, Wallace collected more than 125,000 birds, beetles and other animals. Thousands were new to the West, including one he named Wallace's golden bird wing butterfly. He shot 17 orangutans and shipped their skins back to Britain, became a fan of the durian — a fruit known for its thorns and powerful odor — and admired the moral character and mental capacity of the Dyak people of Borneo.
But his biggest contribution to science was his writings in the Malay archipelago on evolution and natural selection, building on an earlier four-year trek to the Amazon.
In 1855, he laid out the Sarawak law — named after the place he wrote the paper, now a state in modern-day Malaysia — in which he described evolution as a branching tree. His forceful argument in support of evolution came at a time when creationism, or the idea that God created man, was the popular school of thought.
A year later, he proposed what became known as the Wallace Line after traveling to the islands of Bali and Lombok, in what is now Indonesia. He noticed that bird species were different on each island and concluded that a deep water trench created a boundary that separated the animal species of Southeast Asia and Australasia.
Two years after that, Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection — or survival of the fittest — while bedridden with malaria on another nearby island.
His theory was presented together with Darwin's by the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858. Upon his return to England in 1862, Wallace found himself welcomed into a select club of scientists that included Darwin, Sir Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley.
Wallace became one of the most prominent scientists of his day, publishing more than 800 articles and 22 books over the next 50 years. He was a leading voice in an anti-vaccination movement, a proponent of land reform and the father of biogeography, or the study of the geographic distribution of plants and animals.
"He was a person with a remarkable open mind," said Charles H. Smith, a professor and Western Kentucky University librarian who runs a Web site on Wallace. "He had more concern with science as it related to humankind than practically anyone in his time. That is why he was so interested in social issues."
Wallace died in 1913 at the age of 90. Over the years, he slipped into obscurity, joining a long list — British scientist Patrick Matthews and French scientist Jean Baptist LeMarc among them — whose contributions to evolution theory have largely become footnotes.
The soft-spoken, baby-faced Beccaloni became enamored of Wallace as a graduate student studying the evolution of mimicry in butterflies. He took up Wallace's cause in 1999 after stumbling upon his poorly maintained gravestone in Dorset, England.
Calling himself Wallace's Rottweiler, Beccaloni has barnstormed across England to preserve Wallace homes and other sites. He convinced the Natural History Museum in London to buy the scientist's insect collection, correspondence and books from Wallace's two grandsons.
He also runs a Wallace Web site and is helping British standup comedian Bill Bailey plan a routine based on the scientist. Beccaloni's biggest job by far, however, is defending Wallace's legacy.
He and other scholars claim Darwin conspired to ensure his paper was presented with Wallace's to prevent Wallace from getting sole credit. Roy Davies, the author of the "The Darwin Conspiracy," even accuses Darwin of stealing his ideas from Wallace — an allegation dismissed by other Wallace supporters as unsubstantiated.
But Peter Bowler, a Queen's University of Belfast professor who has spent his career studying evolution theory, contends Wallace's achievements have been exaggerated by his supporters.
Wallace did not have the complete theory and nowhere near the evidence Darwin had compiled — and that was needed to win over a skeptical public, Bowler said. Darwin's evidence included fossil records, animal breeding and heredity, while Wallace relied almost exclusively on biogeography.
"How many years would it have taken Wallace to put together the sort of comprehensive account that would have grabbed people's attention the way 'The Origin of Species' did?" Bowler asked. "Without Darwin, I don't think there would have been a great debate about natural selection in the 1860s and 1870s."
Also controversial is Wallace's support of spiritualism, a popular movement that held seances and believed spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. He upset Darwin and damaged his scientific reputation by arguing that the development of the human mind and some bodily attributes were guided by spiritual beings rather than natural selection, Beccaloni acknowledged.
That has turned Wallace into an unlikely hero among some Christian conservatives opposed to the teaching of evolution. He is also used to support intelligent design, the theory that certain features of life forms are so complex that they must have originated from a higher power.
Michael Flannery, the author of the new book "Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution," argues that Wallace was in many ways "the seminal figure in what we consider the intelligent design movement." The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the main supporter of the theory, cites Wallace in its promotional material.
Beccaloni groans when the talk turns to Wallace's spiritualism, noting that he wasn't even a Christian. Christian groups are "grasping at straws," he said, and other academics are using spiritualism to diminish his scientific importance. Beccaloni is trying to keep the focus on his earlier scientific discoveries.
In the Malaysian riverside town of Simunjan, Beccaloni was again on the trail of Wallace. Using Wallace's famous travelogue "The Malay Archipelago" as a map of sorts, he followed a rusted railroad track featured in the book, past paddy fields and palm oil plantations, until the road ended in a peat bog.
That's when Beccaloni began noticing chunks of coal sticking out of the dark soil, a telltale sign of coal works that Wallace described in his book. It was here, Beccaloni surmised, that Wallace spent nine months collecting insects, discovering a strange tree-frog and shooting orangutans.
But nobody would know. The site was unmarked.
___
On the Net:
The Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund: http://wallacefund.info/
The Alfred Russel Wallace Page: http://www.wku.edu/
The Discovery Institute: http://www.discovery.org/
Natural History's Wallace Collection: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/collections-at-the-museum/wallace-collection/index.jsp
Fred Langford Edwards Page: http://www.fredlangfordedwards.com
By MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer
Mon Jun 29, 4:21 am ET
SANTUBONG, Malaysia – As he trudges past chest-high ferns and butterflies the size of saucers, George Beccaloni scours a jungle hilltop overlooking the South China Sea for signs of a long-forgotten Victorian-era scientist.
He finds what he's looking for: an abandoned, two-story guest house, its doors missing and ceiling caved in.
"Excellent. This is the actual spot," he yells.
It is on this site, in a long-gone thatched hut, that Alfred Russel Wallace is believed to have spent weeks in 1855 writing a seminal paper on the theory of evolution. Yet he is largely unknown outside scientific circles today, overshadowed by Charles Darwin, whom most people credit as the father of a theory that explains the origins of life through how plants and animals evolve.
Now, in the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, a growing number of academics and amateur historians are rediscovering Wallace. Their efforts are raising debate over exactly what Wallace contributed to the theory of evolution, and what role, if any, the spiritual world plays in certain aspects of natural selection.
Beccaloni, a 41-year-old British evolutionary biologist with London's Natural History Museum, is on a quest to return Wallace to what he sees as his rightful place in history. He and Fred Langford Edwards, a British artist making an audiovisual project about Wallace, are retracing the scientist's eight-year trip around Southeast Asia.
Unlike Wallace, Darwin spent two decades developing his theory of natural selection and had far more evidence to back it up, as presented in his defining work, "The Origin of Species," published 150 years ago. But Wallace reached the same conclusion before Darwin published his findings, and Beccaloni contends that Wallace deserves equal billing.
"The Darwin industry is what has distorted the whole of history," Beccaloni said. "People have just concentrated on Darwin and his life and work but they fail to see Darwin wasn't alone and he fits into a wider picture."
Wallace, a British beetle and bird collector, set off for Singapore in 1854. Eight years and 14,000 miles (23,000 kilometers) later, he returned to England as one of the most celebrated biologists after Darwin.
Often traveling with a lone assistant and enduring monsoons and malaria, Wallace collected more than 125,000 birds, beetles and other animals. Thousands were new to the West, including one he named Wallace's golden bird wing butterfly. He shot 17 orangutans and shipped their skins back to Britain, became a fan of the durian — a fruit known for its thorns and powerful odor — and admired the moral character and mental capacity of the Dyak people of Borneo.
But his biggest contribution to science was his writings in the Malay archipelago on evolution and natural selection, building on an earlier four-year trek to the Amazon.
In 1855, he laid out the Sarawak law — named after the place he wrote the paper, now a state in modern-day Malaysia — in which he described evolution as a branching tree. His forceful argument in support of evolution came at a time when creationism, or the idea that God created man, was the popular school of thought.
A year later, he proposed what became known as the Wallace Line after traveling to the islands of Bali and Lombok, in what is now Indonesia. He noticed that bird species were different on each island and concluded that a deep water trench created a boundary that separated the animal species of Southeast Asia and Australasia.
Two years after that, Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection — or survival of the fittest — while bedridden with malaria on another nearby island.
His theory was presented together with Darwin's by the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858. Upon his return to England in 1862, Wallace found himself welcomed into a select club of scientists that included Darwin, Sir Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley.
Wallace became one of the most prominent scientists of his day, publishing more than 800 articles and 22 books over the next 50 years. He was a leading voice in an anti-vaccination movement, a proponent of land reform and the father of biogeography, or the study of the geographic distribution of plants and animals.
"He was a person with a remarkable open mind," said Charles H. Smith, a professor and Western Kentucky University librarian who runs a Web site on Wallace. "He had more concern with science as it related to humankind than practically anyone in his time. That is why he was so interested in social issues."
Wallace died in 1913 at the age of 90. Over the years, he slipped into obscurity, joining a long list — British scientist Patrick Matthews and French scientist Jean Baptist LeMarc among them — whose contributions to evolution theory have largely become footnotes.
The soft-spoken, baby-faced Beccaloni became enamored of Wallace as a graduate student studying the evolution of mimicry in butterflies. He took up Wallace's cause in 1999 after stumbling upon his poorly maintained gravestone in Dorset, England.
Calling himself Wallace's Rottweiler, Beccaloni has barnstormed across England to preserve Wallace homes and other sites. He convinced the Natural History Museum in London to buy the scientist's insect collection, correspondence and books from Wallace's two grandsons.
He also runs a Wallace Web site and is helping British standup comedian Bill Bailey plan a routine based on the scientist. Beccaloni's biggest job by far, however, is defending Wallace's legacy.
He and other scholars claim Darwin conspired to ensure his paper was presented with Wallace's to prevent Wallace from getting sole credit. Roy Davies, the author of the "The Darwin Conspiracy," even accuses Darwin of stealing his ideas from Wallace — an allegation dismissed by other Wallace supporters as unsubstantiated.
But Peter Bowler, a Queen's University of Belfast professor who has spent his career studying evolution theory, contends Wallace's achievements have been exaggerated by his supporters.
Wallace did not have the complete theory and nowhere near the evidence Darwin had compiled — and that was needed to win over a skeptical public, Bowler said. Darwin's evidence included fossil records, animal breeding and heredity, while Wallace relied almost exclusively on biogeography.
"How many years would it have taken Wallace to put together the sort of comprehensive account that would have grabbed people's attention the way 'The Origin of Species' did?" Bowler asked. "Without Darwin, I don't think there would have been a great debate about natural selection in the 1860s and 1870s."
Also controversial is Wallace's support of spiritualism, a popular movement that held seances and believed spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. He upset Darwin and damaged his scientific reputation by arguing that the development of the human mind and some bodily attributes were guided by spiritual beings rather than natural selection, Beccaloni acknowledged.
That has turned Wallace into an unlikely hero among some Christian conservatives opposed to the teaching of evolution. He is also used to support intelligent design, the theory that certain features of life forms are so complex that they must have originated from a higher power.
Michael Flannery, the author of the new book "Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution," argues that Wallace was in many ways "the seminal figure in what we consider the intelligent design movement." The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the main supporter of the theory, cites Wallace in its promotional material.
Beccaloni groans when the talk turns to Wallace's spiritualism, noting that he wasn't even a Christian. Christian groups are "grasping at straws," he said, and other academics are using spiritualism to diminish his scientific importance. Beccaloni is trying to keep the focus on his earlier scientific discoveries.
In the Malaysian riverside town of Simunjan, Beccaloni was again on the trail of Wallace. Using Wallace's famous travelogue "The Malay Archipelago" as a map of sorts, he followed a rusted railroad track featured in the book, past paddy fields and palm oil plantations, until the road ended in a peat bog.
That's when Beccaloni began noticing chunks of coal sticking out of the dark soil, a telltale sign of coal works that Wallace described in his book. It was here, Beccaloni surmised, that Wallace spent nine months collecting insects, discovering a strange tree-frog and shooting orangutans.
But nobody would know. The site was unmarked.
___
On the Net:
The Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund: http://wallacefund.info/
The Alfred Russel Wallace Page: http://www.wku.edu/
The Discovery Institute: http://www.discovery.org/
Natural History's Wallace Collection: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/collections-at-the-museum/wallace-collection/index.jsp
Fred Langford Edwards Page: http://www.fredlangfordedwards.com
Friday 26 June 2009
The evolutionary origin of depression
Mild and bitter
Jun 25th 2009
From The Economist print edition
CLINICAL depression is a serious ailment, but almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.
Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.
It is a neat hypothesis, but is it true? A study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests it might be. Carsten Wrosch from Concordia University in Montreal and Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia studied depression in teenage girls. They measured the “goal adjustment capacities” of 97 girls aged 15-19 over the course of 19 months. They asked the participants questions about their ability to disengage from unattainable goals and to re-engage with new goals. They also asked about a range of symptoms associated with depression, and tracked how these changed over the course of the study.
Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.
Mild depressive symptoms can therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, though, severe depression can be the consequence.
The importance of giving up inappropriate goals has already been demonstrated by Dr Wrosch. Two years ago he and his colleagues published a study in which they showed that those teenagers who were better at doing so had a lower concentration of C-reactive protein, a substance made in response to inflammation and associated with an elevated risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Dr Wrosch thus concludes that it is healthy to give up overly ambitious goals. Persistence, though necessary for success and considered a virtue by many, can also have a negative impact on health.
Dr Nesse believes that persistence is a reason for the exceptional level of clinical depression in America—the country that has the highest depression rate in the world. “Persistence is part of the American way of life,” he says. “People here are often driven to pursue overly ambitious goals, which then can lead to depression.” He admits that this is still an unproven hypothesis, but it is one worth considering. Depression may turn out to be an inevitable price of living in a dynamic society.
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13899022&fsrc=nwlgafree
Jun 25th 2009
From The Economist print edition
CLINICAL depression is a serious ailment, but almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.
Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.
It is a neat hypothesis, but is it true? A study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests it might be. Carsten Wrosch from Concordia University in Montreal and Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia studied depression in teenage girls. They measured the “goal adjustment capacities” of 97 girls aged 15-19 over the course of 19 months. They asked the participants questions about their ability to disengage from unattainable goals and to re-engage with new goals. They also asked about a range of symptoms associated with depression, and tracked how these changed over the course of the study.
Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.
Mild depressive symptoms can therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, though, severe depression can be the consequence.
The importance of giving up inappropriate goals has already been demonstrated by Dr Wrosch. Two years ago he and his colleagues published a study in which they showed that those teenagers who were better at doing so had a lower concentration of C-reactive protein, a substance made in response to inflammation and associated with an elevated risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Dr Wrosch thus concludes that it is healthy to give up overly ambitious goals. Persistence, though necessary for success and considered a virtue by many, can also have a negative impact on health.
Dr Nesse believes that persistence is a reason for the exceptional level of clinical depression in America—the country that has the highest depression rate in the world. “Persistence is part of the American way of life,” he says. “People here are often driven to pursue overly ambitious goals, which then can lead to depression.” He admits that this is still an unproven hypothesis, but it is one worth considering. Depression may turn out to be an inevitable price of living in a dynamic society.
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13899022&fsrc=nwlgafree
Thursday 25 June 2009
She has something in her voice
We, the anthropocentric Homo sapiens tend to think that plants don´t "feel", don´t hear. Please read this beautiful report.
Women's voices 'make plants grow faster' finds Royal Horticultural Society
Talking to plants makes them grow, especially if you are a woman, according to an experiment by the Royal Horticultural Society.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 2:23PM BST 22 Jun 2009
Women gardeners' voices speed up growth of tomato plants much more than men's, it found.
In an experiment run over a month, they found that tomato plants grew up to two inches taller if they were serenaded by the dulcet tones of a female rather than a male.
Appropriately the most effective talk came from Sarah Darwin, whose great-great grandfather was legendary botanist Charles Darwin, one of the founding fathers of the RHS' Scientific Committee.
She read a read a passage from the On the Origin of Species and beat nine other 'voices'.
Her plant grew nearly two inches taller than the best performing male and half an inch higher than her nearest competitor.
Colin Crosbie, Garden Superintendent at RHS, said: "We predicted that the male voice would be more effective but it turned out that the ladies were far better than the gentlemen.
"We just don't why. It could be that they have a greater range of pitch and tone that affects the sound waves that hit the plant. Sound waves are an environmental effect just like rain or light."
The experiment began in April at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey, with open auditions for the public to record excerpts from John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream and Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
A variety of voices was then picked to play to 10 tomato plants over a month. Every plant was played a voice through headphones connected to the plant pot, and the conditions for all the plants remained the same throughout the experiment. To ensure the experiment was fair, two control plants were also left to grow in silence.
The results showed that women on average saw their plants rise by an inch on their male counterparts. Some men were so bad that their plants actually grew less than a plant that was left completely alone.
Miss Darwin said, "I think it is an honour to have a voice that can make tomatoes grow, and especially fitting because for a number of years I have been studying wild tomatoes from the Galapagos Islands at the Natural History Museum in London.
"I'm not sure if it's my dulcet tones or the text that I read from On the Origin of Species that made the plant sit up and listen, but either way I think it is great fun and I'm proud of my new title."
Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/5602419/Womens-voices-make-plants-grow-faster-finds-Royal-Horticultural-Society.html
Women's voices 'make plants grow faster' finds Royal Horticultural Society
Talking to plants makes them grow, especially if you are a woman, according to an experiment by the Royal Horticultural Society.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 2:23PM BST 22 Jun 2009
Women gardeners' voices speed up growth of tomato plants much more than men's, it found.
In an experiment run over a month, they found that tomato plants grew up to two inches taller if they were serenaded by the dulcet tones of a female rather than a male.
Appropriately the most effective talk came from Sarah Darwin, whose great-great grandfather was legendary botanist Charles Darwin, one of the founding fathers of the RHS' Scientific Committee.
She read a read a passage from the On the Origin of Species and beat nine other 'voices'.
Her plant grew nearly two inches taller than the best performing male and half an inch higher than her nearest competitor.
Colin Crosbie, Garden Superintendent at RHS, said: "We predicted that the male voice would be more effective but it turned out that the ladies were far better than the gentlemen.
"We just don't why. It could be that they have a greater range of pitch and tone that affects the sound waves that hit the plant. Sound waves are an environmental effect just like rain or light."
The experiment began in April at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey, with open auditions for the public to record excerpts from John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream and Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
A variety of voices was then picked to play to 10 tomato plants over a month. Every plant was played a voice through headphones connected to the plant pot, and the conditions for all the plants remained the same throughout the experiment. To ensure the experiment was fair, two control plants were also left to grow in silence.
The results showed that women on average saw their plants rise by an inch on their male counterparts. Some men were so bad that their plants actually grew less than a plant that was left completely alone.
Miss Darwin said, "I think it is an honour to have a voice that can make tomatoes grow, and especially fitting because for a number of years I have been studying wild tomatoes from the Galapagos Islands at the Natural History Museum in London.
"I'm not sure if it's my dulcet tones or the text that I read from On the Origin of Species that made the plant sit up and listen, but either way I think it is great fun and I'm proud of my new title."
Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/5602419/Womens-voices-make-plants-grow-faster-finds-Royal-Horticultural-Society.html
Tuesday 23 June 2009
The evolution of agriculture, and before
Study: Food storage began well before farming
AP, Mon Jun 22
WASHINGTON – People were storing grain long before they learned to domesticate crops, a new study indicates. A structure used as a food granary discovered in recent excavations in Jordan dates to about 11,300 years ago, according to a report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That's as much as a thousand years before people in the Middle East domesticated grain, the research team led by anthropologist Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame said.
Remains of wild barley were found in the structure, indicating that the grain was collected and saved even though formal cultivation had not yet developed.
The granary was between two other structures used for grain processing and residences, discovered in excavations at Dhra', near the Dead Sea. The granary was round with walls of stone and mud. The researchers said it had a raised floor for air circulation and protection from rodents.
The ability to store food is essential for the development of farming, the researchers said.
"The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years," they reported.
The research was funded by the British Academy, the Council for British Research in the Levant, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the University of Notre Dame.
___
On the Net:
PNAS: http://www.pnas.org
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_on_sc/us_sci_ancient_grain_storage
AP, Mon Jun 22
WASHINGTON – People were storing grain long before they learned to domesticate crops, a new study indicates. A structure used as a food granary discovered in recent excavations in Jordan dates to about 11,300 years ago, according to a report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That's as much as a thousand years before people in the Middle East domesticated grain, the research team led by anthropologist Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame said.
Remains of wild barley were found in the structure, indicating that the grain was collected and saved even though formal cultivation had not yet developed.
The granary was between two other structures used for grain processing and residences, discovered in excavations at Dhra', near the Dead Sea. The granary was round with walls of stone and mud. The researchers said it had a raised floor for air circulation and protection from rodents.
The ability to store food is essential for the development of farming, the researchers said.
"The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years," they reported.
The research was funded by the British Academy, the Council for British Research in the Levant, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the University of Notre Dame.
___
On the Net:
PNAS: http://www.pnas.org
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_on_sc/us_sci_ancient_grain_storage
The evolution of elephants
Indonesian elephant fossil opens window to past
By NINIEK KARMINI, Associated Press
Tue Jun 23, 6:15 am ET
BANDUNG, Indonesia – Indonesian scientists are reconstructing the largest, most complete skeleton of a prehistoric giant elephant ever found in the tropics, a finding that may offer new clues into the largely mysterious origins of its modern Asian cousin.
The prehistoric elephant is believed to have been submerged in quicksand shortly after dying on a riverbed in Java around 200,000 years ago. Its bones — almost perfectly preserved — were discovered by chance in March when an old sand quarry collapsed during monsoon rains.
The animal stood four meters (13-feet) tall, five meters (16-feet) long and weighed more than 10 tons — closer in size to the woolly mammoth of the same period than to the great Asian mammals now on Earth.
Animal fossils are rare in the humid, hot climate of the equator because decomposition occurs extremely quickly.
Following a monthlong excavation, a team of seven paleontologists from the Geology Museum in Bandung, West Java, set the bones in plaster for the trip back to their office where they will be laboriously pieced back together.
"We believe from the shape of its teeth that it was a very primitive elephant," but little else has been verified, said paleontologist Fachroel Aziz, who is heading a 12-strong skeletal reconstruction team.
Scientists agree it is the first time an entire prehistoric elephant skeleton has been unearthed since vertebrate fossil findings began to be recorded in Indonesia in 1863.
"It is very uncommon to discover a fossil like this in a tropical region like Indonesia," said Edi Sunardi, an independent expert at Indonesia's Pajajaran University in Bandung, West Java. "It apparently was covered by volcanic sediment that protected it from high temperatures, erosion and decay."
The next challenge will be removing the delicate bones from their molds and joining them into a stable, upright structure, a process that experts said is already being hampered by a lack of funding, inadequate tools and poor expertise.
Indonesia, an emerging and impoverished democracy of 235 million people, cannot afford to allocate more than a token sum to its aging museums, even for projects that have the potential to advance knowledge about the origin of key native species.
Gert van den Berg, a researcher at Australia's Wollongong University who helped dig up the skeleton, said tests are under way to determine its precise age and species, and that they will help provide details "about when the modern elephants evolved into what they are now."
About 2,000 old elephant remains have been found across the island nation over the past 150 years, but never in such good condition, Aziz said.
"We want to exhibit it publicly because this is a spectacular discovery," he said.
By NINIEK KARMINI, Associated Press
Tue Jun 23, 6:15 am ET
BANDUNG, Indonesia – Indonesian scientists are reconstructing the largest, most complete skeleton of a prehistoric giant elephant ever found in the tropics, a finding that may offer new clues into the largely mysterious origins of its modern Asian cousin.
The prehistoric elephant is believed to have been submerged in quicksand shortly after dying on a riverbed in Java around 200,000 years ago. Its bones — almost perfectly preserved — were discovered by chance in March when an old sand quarry collapsed during monsoon rains.
The animal stood four meters (13-feet) tall, five meters (16-feet) long and weighed more than 10 tons — closer in size to the woolly mammoth of the same period than to the great Asian mammals now on Earth.
Animal fossils are rare in the humid, hot climate of the equator because decomposition occurs extremely quickly.
Following a monthlong excavation, a team of seven paleontologists from the Geology Museum in Bandung, West Java, set the bones in plaster for the trip back to their office where they will be laboriously pieced back together.
"We believe from the shape of its teeth that it was a very primitive elephant," but little else has been verified, said paleontologist Fachroel Aziz, who is heading a 12-strong skeletal reconstruction team.
Scientists agree it is the first time an entire prehistoric elephant skeleton has been unearthed since vertebrate fossil findings began to be recorded in Indonesia in 1863.
"It is very uncommon to discover a fossil like this in a tropical region like Indonesia," said Edi Sunardi, an independent expert at Indonesia's Pajajaran University in Bandung, West Java. "It apparently was covered by volcanic sediment that protected it from high temperatures, erosion and decay."
The next challenge will be removing the delicate bones from their molds and joining them into a stable, upright structure, a process that experts said is already being hampered by a lack of funding, inadequate tools and poor expertise.
Indonesia, an emerging and impoverished democracy of 235 million people, cannot afford to allocate more than a token sum to its aging museums, even for projects that have the potential to advance knowledge about the origin of key native species.
Gert van den Berg, a researcher at Australia's Wollongong University who helped dig up the skeleton, said tests are under way to determine its precise age and species, and that they will help provide details "about when the modern elephants evolved into what they are now."
About 2,000 old elephant remains have been found across the island nation over the past 150 years, but never in such good condition, Aziz said.
"We want to exhibit it publicly because this is a spectacular discovery," he said.
Monday 22 June 2009
Evolution and cooking
Books of The Times
Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid
BYDWIGHT GARNER
Published: May 26, 2009
Human beings are not obviously equipped to be nature’s gladiators. We have no claws, no armor. That we eat meat seems surprising, because we are not made for chewing it uncooked in the wild. Our jaws are weak; our teeth are blunt; our mouths are small. That thing below our noses? It truly is a pie hole.
A Conversation With Richard Wrangham: From Studying Chimps, a Theory on Cooking (April 21, 2009) To attend to these facts, for some people, is to plead for vegetarianism or for a raw-food diet. We should forage and eat the way our long-ago ancestors surely did. For Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and the author of “Catching Fire,” however, these facts and others demonstrate something quite different. They help prove that we are, as he vividly puts it, “the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”
Apes began to morph into humans, and the species Homo erectus emerged some two million years ago, Mr. Wrangham argues, for one fundamental reason: We learned to tame fire and heat our food.
“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”
He continues: “The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer.
There were other benefits for humanity’s ancestors. He writes: “The protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for males, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey. While other habilines” — tool-using prehumans — “elsewhere in Africa continued for several hundred thousand years to eat their food raw, one lucky group became Homo erectus — and humanity began.”
You read all this and think: Is it really possible that this is an original bit of news? Mr. Wrangham seems as surprised as we are. “What is extraordinary about this simple claim,” he writes, “is that it is new.”
Mr. Wrangham arrives at his theory by first walking us through the work of other anthropologists and naturalists, including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Darwin, who did not pay much attention to cooking, assuming that humans could have done pretty well without it.
He then delivers a thorough, delightfully brutal takedown of the raw-food movement and its pieties. He cites studies showing that a strict raw-foods diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply, and notes that, in one survey, 50 percent of the women on such a diet stopped menstruating. There is no way our human ancestors survived, much less reproduced, on it. He seems pleased to be able to report that raw diets make you urinate too often, and cause back and hip problems.
Even castaways, he writes, have needed to cook their food to survive: “I have not been able to find any reports of people living long term on raw wild food.” Thor Heyerdahl, traveling by primitive raft across the Pacific, took along a small stove and a cook. Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe, built fires and cooked on them.
Mr. Wrangham also dismisses, for complicated social and economic reasons, the popular Man-the-Hunter hypothesis about evolution, which posits that meat-eating alone was responsible. Meat eating “has had less impact on our bodies than cooked food,” he writes. “Even vegetarians thrive on cooked diets. We are cooks more than carnivores.”
Among the most provocative passages in “Catching Fire” are those that probe the evolution of gender roles. Cooking made women more vulnerable, Mr. Wrangham ruefully observes, to male authority.
“Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited,” he writes. “Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food.” Women needed male protection.
Marriage, or what Mr. Wrangham calls “a primitive protection racket,” was a solution. Mr. Wrangham’s nuanced ideas cannot be given their full due here, but he is not happy to note that cooking “trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture.”
“Cooking,” he writes, “created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.” As a student, Mr. Wrangham studied with the primatologist Jane Goodall in Gombe, Tanzania, and he is the author, with Dale Peterson, of a previous book called “Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.” In “Catching Fire” he has delivered a rare thing: a slim book — the text itself is a mere 207 pages — that contains serious science yet is related in direct, no-nonsense prose. It is toothsome, skillfully prepared brain food.
“Zoologists often try to capture the essence of our species with such phrases as the naked, bipedal or big-brained ape,” Mr. Wrangham writes. He adds, in a sentence that posits Mick Jagger as an anomaly and boils down much of his impressive erudition: “They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape.”
source:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid
BYDWIGHT GARNER
Published: May 26, 2009
Human beings are not obviously equipped to be nature’s gladiators. We have no claws, no armor. That we eat meat seems surprising, because we are not made for chewing it uncooked in the wild. Our jaws are weak; our teeth are blunt; our mouths are small. That thing below our noses? It truly is a pie hole.
A Conversation With Richard Wrangham: From Studying Chimps, a Theory on Cooking (April 21, 2009) To attend to these facts, for some people, is to plead for vegetarianism or for a raw-food diet. We should forage and eat the way our long-ago ancestors surely did. For Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and the author of “Catching Fire,” however, these facts and others demonstrate something quite different. They help prove that we are, as he vividly puts it, “the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”
Apes began to morph into humans, and the species Homo erectus emerged some two million years ago, Mr. Wrangham argues, for one fundamental reason: We learned to tame fire and heat our food.
“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”
He continues: “The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer.
There were other benefits for humanity’s ancestors. He writes: “The protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for males, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey. While other habilines” — tool-using prehumans — “elsewhere in Africa continued for several hundred thousand years to eat their food raw, one lucky group became Homo erectus — and humanity began.”
You read all this and think: Is it really possible that this is an original bit of news? Mr. Wrangham seems as surprised as we are. “What is extraordinary about this simple claim,” he writes, “is that it is new.”
Mr. Wrangham arrives at his theory by first walking us through the work of other anthropologists and naturalists, including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Darwin, who did not pay much attention to cooking, assuming that humans could have done pretty well without it.
He then delivers a thorough, delightfully brutal takedown of the raw-food movement and its pieties. He cites studies showing that a strict raw-foods diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply, and notes that, in one survey, 50 percent of the women on such a diet stopped menstruating. There is no way our human ancestors survived, much less reproduced, on it. He seems pleased to be able to report that raw diets make you urinate too often, and cause back and hip problems.
Even castaways, he writes, have needed to cook their food to survive: “I have not been able to find any reports of people living long term on raw wild food.” Thor Heyerdahl, traveling by primitive raft across the Pacific, took along a small stove and a cook. Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe, built fires and cooked on them.
Mr. Wrangham also dismisses, for complicated social and economic reasons, the popular Man-the-Hunter hypothesis about evolution, which posits that meat-eating alone was responsible. Meat eating “has had less impact on our bodies than cooked food,” he writes. “Even vegetarians thrive on cooked diets. We are cooks more than carnivores.”
Among the most provocative passages in “Catching Fire” are those that probe the evolution of gender roles. Cooking made women more vulnerable, Mr. Wrangham ruefully observes, to male authority.
“Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited,” he writes. “Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food.” Women needed male protection.
Marriage, or what Mr. Wrangham calls “a primitive protection racket,” was a solution. Mr. Wrangham’s nuanced ideas cannot be given their full due here, but he is not happy to note that cooking “trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture.”
“Cooking,” he writes, “created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.” As a student, Mr. Wrangham studied with the primatologist Jane Goodall in Gombe, Tanzania, and he is the author, with Dale Peterson, of a previous book called “Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.” In “Catching Fire” he has delivered a rare thing: a slim book — the text itself is a mere 207 pages — that contains serious science yet is related in direct, no-nonsense prose. It is toothsome, skillfully prepared brain food.
“Zoologists often try to capture the essence of our species with such phrases as the naked, bipedal or big-brained ape,” Mr. Wrangham writes. He adds, in a sentence that posits Mick Jagger as an anomaly and boils down much of his impressive erudition: “They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape.”
source:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Sunday 21 June 2009
Homosexuality is quite widespread in animals
Same-Sex Behavior Seen in Nearly All Animal Groups, Review Finds
UC Riverside evolutionary biologists find majority of studies focus on why same-sex behavior in animals exists, but not what its consequences are
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Same-sex behavior is a nearly universal phenomenon in the animal kingdom, common across species, from worms to frogs to birds, concludes a new review of existing research.
“It’s clear that same-sex sexual behavior extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies,” said Nathan Bailey, the first author of the review paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at UC Riverside.
There is a caveat, however. The review also reports that same-sex behaviors are not the same across species, and that researchers may be calling qualitatively different phenomena by the same name.
“For example, male fruit flies may court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discriminate between the sexes,” Bailey said. “But that is very different from male bottlenose dolphins, who engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding, or female Laysan Albatross that can remain pair-bonded for life and cooperatively rear young.”
Published June 16 in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, the review by Bailey and Marlene Zuk, a professor of biology at UCR, also finds that although many studies are performed in the context of understanding the evolutionary origins of same-sex sexual behavior, almost none have considered its evolutionary consequences.
“Same-sex behaviors—courtship, mounting or parenting—are traits that may have been shaped by natural selection, a basic mechanism of evolution that occurs over successive generations,” Bailey said. “But our review of studies also suggests that these same-sex behaviors might act as selective forces in and of themselves.”
A selective force, which is a sudden or gradual stress placed on a population, affects the reproductive success of individuals in the population.
“When we think of selective forces, we tend to think of things like weather, temperature, or geographic features, but we can think of the social circumstances in a population of animals as a selective force, too,” Bailey said. “Same-sex behavior radically changes those social circumstances, for example, by removing some individuals from the pool of animals available for mating.”
Bailey, who works in Zuk’s lab, noted that researchers in the field have made significant strides in the past two and a half decades studying the genetic and neural mechanisms that produce same-sex behaviors in individuals, and the ultimate reasons for their existence in populations.
“But like any other behavior that doesn’t lead directly to reproduction—such as aggression or altruism—same-sex behavior can have evolutionary consequences that are just now beginning to be considered,” he said. “For example, male-male copulations in locusts can be costly for the mounted male, and this cost may in turn increase selection pressure for males’ tendency to release a chemical called panacetylnitrile, which dissuades other males from mounting them.”
Next in their research, Bailey and Zuk plan to begin experimentally addressing some of the many issues raised in their review.
Said Bailey, “We want to get at this question: what are the evolutionary consequences of these behaviors? Are they important in the evolution of mating behavior, or do they just add extra ‘background noise’? We are pursuing work on the Laysan Albatross, in which females form same-sex pairs and rear young together. Same-sex behavior in this species may not be aberrant, but instead can arise as an alternative reproductive strategy.”
Source:http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=2122
Nathan Bailey nathanb@ucr.edu
Marlene Zuk zuk@ucr.edu
UC Riverside evolutionary biologists find majority of studies focus on why same-sex behavior in animals exists, but not what its consequences are
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Same-sex behavior is a nearly universal phenomenon in the animal kingdom, common across species, from worms to frogs to birds, concludes a new review of existing research.
“It’s clear that same-sex sexual behavior extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies,” said Nathan Bailey, the first author of the review paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at UC Riverside.
There is a caveat, however. The review also reports that same-sex behaviors are not the same across species, and that researchers may be calling qualitatively different phenomena by the same name.
“For example, male fruit flies may court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discriminate between the sexes,” Bailey said. “But that is very different from male bottlenose dolphins, who engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding, or female Laysan Albatross that can remain pair-bonded for life and cooperatively rear young.”
Published June 16 in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, the review by Bailey and Marlene Zuk, a professor of biology at UCR, also finds that although many studies are performed in the context of understanding the evolutionary origins of same-sex sexual behavior, almost none have considered its evolutionary consequences.
“Same-sex behaviors—courtship, mounting or parenting—are traits that may have been shaped by natural selection, a basic mechanism of evolution that occurs over successive generations,” Bailey said. “But our review of studies also suggests that these same-sex behaviors might act as selective forces in and of themselves.”
A selective force, which is a sudden or gradual stress placed on a population, affects the reproductive success of individuals in the population.
“When we think of selective forces, we tend to think of things like weather, temperature, or geographic features, but we can think of the social circumstances in a population of animals as a selective force, too,” Bailey said. “Same-sex behavior radically changes those social circumstances, for example, by removing some individuals from the pool of animals available for mating.”
Bailey, who works in Zuk’s lab, noted that researchers in the field have made significant strides in the past two and a half decades studying the genetic and neural mechanisms that produce same-sex behaviors in individuals, and the ultimate reasons for their existence in populations.
“But like any other behavior that doesn’t lead directly to reproduction—such as aggression or altruism—same-sex behavior can have evolutionary consequences that are just now beginning to be considered,” he said. “For example, male-male copulations in locusts can be costly for the mounted male, and this cost may in turn increase selection pressure for males’ tendency to release a chemical called panacetylnitrile, which dissuades other males from mounting them.”
Next in their research, Bailey and Zuk plan to begin experimentally addressing some of the many issues raised in their review.
Said Bailey, “We want to get at this question: what are the evolutionary consequences of these behaviors? Are they important in the evolution of mating behavior, or do they just add extra ‘background noise’? We are pursuing work on the Laysan Albatross, in which females form same-sex pairs and rear young together. Same-sex behavior in this species may not be aberrant, but instead can arise as an alternative reproductive strategy.”
Source:http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=2122
Nathan Bailey nathanb@ucr.edu
Marlene Zuk zuk@ucr.edu
Molecular biology breakthrough
A new method for computing evolutionary trees could revolutionize evolutionary biology
AUSTIN, Texas—Detailed, accurate evolutionary trees that reveal the relatedness of living things can now be determined much faster and for thousands of species with a computing method developed by computer scientists and a biologist at The University of Texas at Austin.
They report their new method in the journal Science.
Since Charles Darwin, biologists have constructed evolutionary trees to explain the relatedness of plants, animals and other organisms. The science of figuring out these trees, known as systematics, has progressed significantly in the last two decades largely due to advances in computation, genetics and molecular biology.
However, many of the relationships among the world's 1.5 million described species (the true number could be 10 million or more) remain to be figured out, and surprises still remain. Figuring out these relationships requires analyzing large amounts of molecular data, such as DNA and protein sequences.
Computer scientist Tandy Warnow, biologist Randy Linder and their graduate students have created an automated computing method, called SATé, that can analyze these molecular data from thousands of organisms, simultaneously figuring out how the sequences should be organized and computing their evolutionary relatedness in as little as 24 hours.
Previous simultaneous methods like Warnow and Linder's have been limited to analyzing 20 species or fewer and have taken months to complete.
"SATé could completely change the practice of making evolutionary trees and revolutionize our understanding of evolution," says Warnow, professor of computer science and lead author of the study.
In addition, SATé can accurately analyze DNA sequences that are rapidly evolving. These sequences have been previously avoided due to concern that the resulting trees would be poor.
Before a tree, or phylogeny, can be determined, DNA and protein sequence data must be organized. This process is called alignment. Key to Warnow and Linder's program is its ability to quickly and accurately align these data.
"Our process is novel because it rapidly and simultaneously aligns sequences and looks for the best phylogenies," says Linder, associate professor of integrative biology. "The old way of doing this for a large number of sequences was basically to align the data once, but we can look at many arrangements to find better ones."
This is important because different alignments can lead to significantly different phylogenies, and scientists must find the phylogeny that best represents the evolutionary relationships among the species in question.
For their paper, Warnow, Linder and their students tested SATé using computer-generated data and real biological data. The biological data had been previously aligned manually by other experts.
The new phylogenies closely match those existing, both validating the method's potential, and, in some cases, validating the evolutionary trees themselves.
"Instead of doing things by hand, evolutionary biologists can now trust our automated program," says Warnow. "It will enable the creation of much more accurate trees, especially for the Tree of Life, which deals with hundreds of thousands of gene sequences from the millions of species on Earth."
"Warnow and Linder have created a method that speeds up the process and removes any subjectivity," says Michael Braun, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Institution not associated with this project. "This is a major step forward for evolutionary biology."
###
Contact: Tandy Warnow
tandy@cs.utexas.edu
512-471-9724
University of Texas at Austin
Computer science graduate student Kevin Liu is first author on the paper. Students Sindhu Raghavan and Serita Nelesen also contributed to the project and co-authored the paper.
Additional contacts:
Randy Linder, Section of Integrative Biology, rlinder@mail.utexas.edu, 512-471-7825
Lee Clippard, media relations, lclippard@mail.utexas.edu, 512-232-0675
AUSTIN, Texas—Detailed, accurate evolutionary trees that reveal the relatedness of living things can now be determined much faster and for thousands of species with a computing method developed by computer scientists and a biologist at The University of Texas at Austin.
They report their new method in the journal Science.
Since Charles Darwin, biologists have constructed evolutionary trees to explain the relatedness of plants, animals and other organisms. The science of figuring out these trees, known as systematics, has progressed significantly in the last two decades largely due to advances in computation, genetics and molecular biology.
However, many of the relationships among the world's 1.5 million described species (the true number could be 10 million or more) remain to be figured out, and surprises still remain. Figuring out these relationships requires analyzing large amounts of molecular data, such as DNA and protein sequences.
Computer scientist Tandy Warnow, biologist Randy Linder and their graduate students have created an automated computing method, called SATé, that can analyze these molecular data from thousands of organisms, simultaneously figuring out how the sequences should be organized and computing their evolutionary relatedness in as little as 24 hours.
Previous simultaneous methods like Warnow and Linder's have been limited to analyzing 20 species or fewer and have taken months to complete.
"SATé could completely change the practice of making evolutionary trees and revolutionize our understanding of evolution," says Warnow, professor of computer science and lead author of the study.
In addition, SATé can accurately analyze DNA sequences that are rapidly evolving. These sequences have been previously avoided due to concern that the resulting trees would be poor.
Before a tree, or phylogeny, can be determined, DNA and protein sequence data must be organized. This process is called alignment. Key to Warnow and Linder's program is its ability to quickly and accurately align these data.
"Our process is novel because it rapidly and simultaneously aligns sequences and looks for the best phylogenies," says Linder, associate professor of integrative biology. "The old way of doing this for a large number of sequences was basically to align the data once, but we can look at many arrangements to find better ones."
This is important because different alignments can lead to significantly different phylogenies, and scientists must find the phylogeny that best represents the evolutionary relationships among the species in question.
For their paper, Warnow, Linder and their students tested SATé using computer-generated data and real biological data. The biological data had been previously aligned manually by other experts.
The new phylogenies closely match those existing, both validating the method's potential, and, in some cases, validating the evolutionary trees themselves.
"Instead of doing things by hand, evolutionary biologists can now trust our automated program," says Warnow. "It will enable the creation of much more accurate trees, especially for the Tree of Life, which deals with hundreds of thousands of gene sequences from the millions of species on Earth."
"Warnow and Linder have created a method that speeds up the process and removes any subjectivity," says Michael Braun, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Institution not associated with this project. "This is a major step forward for evolutionary biology."
###
Contact: Tandy Warnow
tandy@cs.utexas.edu
512-471-9724
University of Texas at Austin
Computer science graduate student Kevin Liu is first author on the paper. Students Sindhu Raghavan and Serita Nelesen also contributed to the project and co-authored the paper.
Additional contacts:
Randy Linder, Section of Integrative Biology, rlinder@mail.utexas.edu, 512-471-7825
Lee Clippard, media relations, lclippard@mail.utexas.edu, 512-232-0675
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