Evolution: Education and Outreach is a relatively new journal that helps teachers, students, and scientists teach evolutionary biology. I’ve just contributed a piece to a special issue on the evolution of the eye. I take a look at a couple examples of eyes evolving in weird ways. One example may be familiar to readers of this blog–the flatfish. The other example, illustrated here, is the stalk-eyed fly. The point I try to make in the piece is that these examples are not just a couple exhibits at a freak show. They tell us something important about the forces at work in evolution. Thankfully, the editors have made the journal open-access, so you can go read it for yourself.
Author: Lori Jia
Jenny writes: “I’m nearing the end of getting my undergrad in Zoology and I decided to do something to commemorate it. I like the simplicity of a Punnett square and I like that such complicated theories that make up Mendelian genetics can be illustrated in 6 lines and 12 letters. And since the letters are ambiguous I decided to go for ‘E’ for my last initial.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published October 18, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
My mother, on whom I depend for all my New Jersey history, passed on a delightful tale of George Washington, Tom Paine, and their passion for chemistry experiments. In early November 1783, Tom Paine paid a visit to George Washington in Rockingham, New Jersey, where Washington was waiting for news of the end of the revolutionary war. One night Paine and Washington got to talking with two colonels about the will-o-the-wisp, the fiery globe that people sometimes claimed to see floating over marshes.
They came up with two plausible hypotheses. The colonels thought that they were produced from some kind of matter in the marches, such as turpentine. Washington and Paine thought it was a gas.
Continue reading “Science and Politics: The Tale of George Washington’s Swamp Gas”
One of Darwin’s lesser known obsessions was with faces–how we make different faces, and what they say about us. Today, psychologists and neuroscientists are discovering the hidden conversation between brain and face, with a lot of tools Darwin never had–MRI scanners, subcutaneous electrodes, and Botox.
Botox?
Indeed. In fact, some recent studies with Botox raise the weird possibility that our national love affair with that face-freezing drug may be subtly altering the emotions of millions of people.
Continue reading “Darwin, Botox, and The Brain’s Outer Edge”
[10/16/08 Correction appended: see end of post]
When our ancestors moved ashore some 360 million years ago, they underwent a lot of changes as they evolved from ocean-swimming fish to land-walking tetrapods. For one thing, they needed feet instead of fins. Paleontologists have discovered a series of fossils that document the early evolution of limb bones in our aquatic ancestors, showing how long bones first evolved, then parts of the wrist and digit-like bones, and finally full-blown feet.
Continue reading “The Shoulder Bone’s Connected to the Ear Bone…”