Homo floresiensis update: The Economist weighs in on the “borrowing” of the fossils. They mention that when the bones were removed, they were simply stuffed in a leather bag. This is not exactly the sort of procedure you see in protocols for avoiding contamination of ancient DNA. In the Australian, the discoverers of “Florence” vow to return to the fossil site, and this time they’ll put their discoveries in a really good safe. Wise move.
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In tomorrow’s New York Times, I have an article about how to reconstruct a genome that’s been gone for 80 million years. The genome in question belongs to the common ancestor of humans and many other mammals (fancy name: Boreoeutheria). In a paper in this month’s Genome Research, scientists compared the same chunk of DNA in 19 species of mammals. (The chunk is 1.1 million base pairs long and includes ten genes and a lot of junk.) The researchers could work their way backwards to the ancestral genetic chunk, and then showed they could be 98.5% certain of the accuracy of the reconstruction.
The tension continues to mount over the locking-up of the Homo floresiensis fossils, according to this new article in the Australian. (via Gene Expression)
I have a short piece in today’s New York Times about how male swallows are evolving longer tails, which female swallows find sexy. Here’s the original paper in press at The Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Measuring the effects of natural selection is tough work, the details of which are impossible to squeeze into a brief news article. Scientists have to document a change in a population of animals–the length of feathers, for example–but then they have to determine that the change is a product of genetic change. We are much taller than people 200 years ago, but it’s clearthat most, if not all, of this change is simply a response of our bodies to better food and medicine. The authors of the swallow paper carried out a number of studies that suggest that the length of swallow tails is genetically based, and that those genes are changing. If they’re right–and other experts I contacted think they are–it’s a striking example of how quickly the sex lives of wild animals can evolve.
On Wednesday I spoke on “The Current,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s morning radio show. The hour-long segment focuses on various aspects of evolution, such as the evolution of diseases and the ongoing creationist circus in Georgia. I spoke about how humans are altering the evolution of other species. You can listen to the entire episode here. The audio file is broken up into pieces; part two and part three are the evolution segment.