Posts Tagged ‘evolution’

On Lamarck and Trees

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Over at Genetic Future, Daniel MacArthur quotes Joel Parker berating as ‘embarrassing’ biologists who claim that it was Darwin, and not Lamarck, who came up with the idea of an evolutionary tree:

I have noticed many evolutionary biologists making an embarrassing mistake of falsely attributing the first use of the tree analogy to Darwin. This has occurred in numerous documentaries and on websites which I will pass on naming here. Ironically, the earliest use of the tree analogy diagram to depict evolution was published in the year of Darwin’s birth (1809) by Lamarck in his book Philosophie Zoologique (see pg 463, http://tinyurl.com/knt7vr). Lamarck even uses botanical terms (branches and rameaux) to describe the origin of animals with respect to this figure. The figure that is usually cited from Darwin’s notebook is from 1837 (http://tinyurl.com/6hs5uv), a full 8 years after Lamarck’s death. Even with our high admiration for Darwin, we should at least give credit where credit is due, and not forget that much of evolution was becoming understood before Darwin. Explaining the mechanism of natural selection was Darwin’s great contribution.

This is actually largely correct; Lamarck did have a view of evolution that involved what we would now call evolutionary branching, though it was very different from what we now know to be the case. Lamarck deserves to be read and understood as one of the first people to put together a coherent view of evolution.

However, the statement is very wrong in a number of ways. It is far from a mistake to refer to Darwin as the originator of the evolutionary tree, and those of us who do so do so not out of ignorance.
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Research Interests Translated

Friday, August 14th, 2009

I recently updated the information on my website, and in doing so I decided to produce two versions of my research interests. The first is for other scientists, and the second is a translation for lay people. I would be interested to know how people think this is pitched; is the lay-information too confusing, or is it too simple and patronising?

I think every scientist should try and do this at some point. It is an interesting exercise to see how well you can communicate and summarise the entirety of your research in a way that doesn’t use the shared lingo and knowledge base that you have access to when taking to other scientists. Plus, of course, communicating your work to the world outside of academia is generally A Good Thing.
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An Ammonite Tree

Monday, April 13th, 2009

I was clearing out my photos this weekend, and I found a number of pictures that I had taken on my trip to Amsterdam Zoo a few months ago. One exhibit consisted of a long tree/time-line of Ammonite evolution, stretching from the Devonian up to the KT Boundary, showing which groups were descended from which. I found it wonderfully presented, with different colouring representing the different suborders, and fossils attached at various times, so you could see how the different forms changed over time. I really am a sucker for phylogenetic trees, especially those that manage to integrate other visual information.

The exhibit was slightly sad, however. It was up a relatively hidden away staircase in an already pretty out-of-the-way building. I stood there looking at it and taking pictures for a good half an hour, and nobody even came into the room, let alone spent any time looking at the exhibition. I found it a little tragic that someone had put so much effort into presenting so much information in a way that could be easily understood, and now it sits where not many people will see it. Added to this, I expect (though don’t know) that not many people will be interested in following ammonite evolution, especially when there are dinosaur bones around.

My hope is that the University of Amsterdam makes us of these sorts of resources in their classes: I remember loving the undergrad classes which involved wondering around the Cambridge museums, especially those that went through different groups, describing how they fit together in a classification system, and what that can tell us about how they evolved.

Anyway, I stuck the pictures I took together to reconstruct part of the exhibit. Click the (rather large) thumbnail below to see low quality .gif of it; when I get back I’ll upload a higher quality one.

UPDATE 17/04/09: Uploaded higher quality version, click thumbnail to view.

amniotes.gif

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On Darwin Day and the Cosmic Web

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Good Morning, reader (if it is not morning, due to laziness or the inevitable passing of time, then Good Day). More importantly, Happy Darwin Day. Today is the 200th Anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and various events are taking place today and throughout this year, notably the Natural History Museum’s special exhibition. Nature has put on a special issue to mark the occasion, as well as a free podcast. I am also looking forward to the Endless Forms exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum here in Cambridge, about the connections between Darwin and visual art. And, as I know you love words as much as I, Ben Zimmer (brother to Carl Zimmer, one of my favourite science writers) has a blog post about Darwin’s influence of language.

On an unrelated note, my astrophysicist friend Olaf Davis, co-author of our game Biology or Physics (as featured on German TV!), has started up a blog. It is called Cosmic Web, and he intends to talk about astronomy and more general science communication. Olaf is a pretty awesome writer, and good at explaining complex ideas in simple ways, so the blog should we well worth checking out.

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On Michele Hanson and Game Theory

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

I read the Guardian newspaper on a semi-regular basis, and I find their coverage to range from Pretty Good to Good Lord No, with a peak around Not Bad (the quality is somewhat moot, since the ever-delightful Ben Goldacre, among other loved columnists, guarantee that I will always return).

However, there is the occasional distressing piece from an individual notably unaware of the complexity, and often the substance, of what they are talking about. One source that provides such tidbits with unfortunate frequency is in the G2 columnist Michele Hanson. Now, her column usually just offers Humorous Anecdotes and Gripes, which is fine for a supplement, but she also spends plenty of time commenting on science subjects from a platform of ignorance and, more worrying, derisive scorn. From yesterday’s column:

A bumper crop of bad science plopped out of our universities and hospitals this week. Three lots at once, and all about relationships. The first gang, from UCL, LSE and Warwick Medical School, have “developed a mathematical model of the mating game to help explain why courtship is often protracted”. Or as every girl’s mother has probably told her, “Don’t do it on the first date. If he can’t wait, he’s not worth it.” [...]

I would like to tear my hair out. I ought to be used to professors churning out this sort of old-hat, inapplicable drek, time after time, but for me the shock never fades. How do they get away with it? Has Professor Robert Seymour, of UCL, been shut away in the groves of academe since birth, and does he really think that we don’t know that “longer courtship is a way for the female to acquire information about the male”. Has he ever met a female person? Or a male from the outside world? Did he not know already that we know that you can’t get to know someone all that well in the course of a quick bang?

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On Life Finding A Way

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

You may be know, for my Day Job I am a Ph.D. student at the Sanger Institute just outside Cambridge, doing lots of exciting things with genomes and the like. However, as you may not know (but, to be honest, are just as likely to as not), as my Thing On The Side I study evolutionary algorithms with my previous supervisor Yogi Jaeger. In my first Fancy Perk of being a full-time researcher, I will be going to Amsterdam later this month to give a talk at the University of Amsterdam on a comparison between two algorithms.

Now I think the details of the comparison are actually pretty interesting to a lay-person, especially because they lead to some idle speculation about the nature of evolutionary forces. Now, Yogi generally doesn’t like me speculating about such things, since he thinks it isn’t rigorous, and he points out that lots of people far smarter than me spend their time doing advanced theoretical studies about the constraints and capacities of the evolutionary process. However, I know that you, my most kind blogventurer, will not raise such objections. And thus, once again I will subject you to my idle musing.
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