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.
Category: Blog
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.
Last month saw the bombshell report that a tiny species of hominid lived on an Indonesian island 18,000 years ago. Since then there has been a dribbling of follow-up news. Some American paleoanthropologists have expressed skepticism, pointing out that while bones from several small individuals have been found, only one skull has turned up. The skull was the most distinctive part of the skeleton, with a minuscule brain and other features that suggested it was not closely related to our own species. The skeptics suggest that these hominids were actually modern human pygmies, and that the skull came from an individual who suffered a genetic disorder called microcephaly.
In tomorrow’s issue of the New York Times, I have an essay that grew out of a meeting I went to earlier this month on natural history illustrations through the ages. The essay is accompanied by some of the cooler images I saw there, some of which are also included in the web version. Here’s one that wasn’t–one of the first illustrations of the legendary Victoria Regia water lily, so big that a single leaf could support a grown man. I explain in the essay why this picture was the 1854 equivalent of a high-resolution digital scan.
There are lots of news stories today (as well as PZ Myers’ take) about the fabulous new discovery in Spain of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, a 13-million year old fossil close to the common ancestor of all living great apes.