Archive for the 'evolution' Category

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Why Your Penis Has No Spine

Regulatory DNA changes have made a huge impact on the evolution of human-specific traits.  A study in the latest issue of Nature covers not just the usual stuff, like what has been added in evolution to make us distinctly ‘human’, but rather what was lost.

We’re obviously different from animals and the researchers set out to find some molecular occurrences that are present in chimpanzees and other mammals but not in people – they found 583, which they call hCONDELs, 510 which were validated, mostly in nonfunctional DNA.  One instance sure to catch attention is deletion of a penile spine enhancer from the human androgen receptor (AR) gene, a  change correlated with a change in human anatomy –  namely loss of penile spines. 

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Monday, February 28th, 2011

Group Selfishness In Our Genes Is Original Sin – Nobel Laureate Christian De Duve

Evolution has no moral compass.  We all know that.  And it has no guiding hand.  For that reason, says Christian de Duve, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain and Nobel laureate (Medicine or Physiology 1974), we may be doomed.

And to get his point across to all sides, he uses an Original Sin metaphor.   

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Friday, February 25th, 2011

Climate Change Means Tree Of Life Will Get Slimmer

A study just published in the journal Nature by researchers in France, Portugal and Spain looks for the first time at the effects of climate change on the tree of life (that aggregates species according to their evolution/genetic similarity) to find that the whole of it will be affected.

But this is not all bad news because even if the tree is to become “thinner” it keeps its structure as there will be no major losses of biodiversity contrary to what other studies had suggested (this would occur if localized “branches” were totally eliminated).

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Friday, October 24th, 2008

Everything I Need To Know About Science I Learned From Watching “The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra”

It’s not often you can boil down complicated abstract ideas of science or culture into simple concepts everyone can understand.  Gems like “for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction” don’t come along every day.   But every time someone asks me what science is like I simply say “You’ve seen The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.  It’s like that” and they nod knowingly.

What?  You haven’t seen it?   Read on my friends.   In a few key phrases you will know everything you need to know.  Science wisdom, as distilled by quotes from one of the greatest science films of all time (and it’s fun for Halloween too) – The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s also PG and totally safe for older children, unless your kid is prone to irrational fear of Skeletorama-motion plastic props and utters sentences like …

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Posted in actresses, animal activists, biology, climate change, culture, environment, evolution, global warming, holidays, hot chicks, humor, movies, physics, science, space, vampires | 2 Comments »



Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

Can’t Get A Date? Science Has The Answer

Want to know the best result of a vigorous debate about evolution? It’s now okay to talk about how people are different without getting into all of that touchy-feely “you’re special too” hoopie. Let’s take mathematicians, for example. They have always been toilet monkeys for scientists but in public we had to be nice to them and nod our heads at what they said even though we could do everything they could do ( scribble gibberish on a chalkboard )and we did it with a lot more style. It’s not us being mean to say it now, it’s just data.

Fellow scientists who aren’t concerned about being politically correct are finally laying it out there about differences between men and women too. I don’t know about you but this scientist did much of his young schooling in the 1970s when the popular theory was that there were no differences between men and women and if you raised them the same, they would be the same. This was baffling at the time but, hey, if important scientists said it, it had to be true, right? That’s why I believe those evolution guys today when they say that micro- and macro-evolution are the same thing and that evolution doesn’t require actual evidence, like fossils.
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Posted in culture, evolution, hot chicks, science, sex, supermodels | 10 Comments »