The Great Lakes of East Africa swarm with fish–particularly with one kind of fish known as cichlids. In Lake Victoria alone you can find over 500 species. These species come in different colors and make their living in many different ways–sucking out eyeballs of other cichlids, scraping algae off of rocks, and so on. What’s strange about all this is that the Great Lakes of East Africa are some of the youngest lakes on Earth. By some estimates, Lake Victoria was a dry lake bed 15,000 years ago. All that diversity has evolved in a very short period of time.
Category: Blog
Science is so specialized these days that it’s hard for scientists to look up beyond the very narrow confines of their own work. Biologists who study cartilage don’t have much to say to biologists who study retinas. Astronomers who study globular clusters probably can’t tell you what’s new with planetary disks. But sometimes scientists from different specialties can come together and integrate their work into something truly impressive. A case in point comes from some ongoing research into the evolution of language.
My book Soul Made Flesh will be coming out in January, but in the meantime, I’ve posted an excerpt on my web site. You can read it online or print out a pdf.
In the comments to my post yesterday about Nanoarchaeum equitans, an ancient parasite, the discussion took an interesting turn.
Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye–number of legs, color of hair, live young or eggs. Or they can paint a creature at the cellular level–the twist and turns of collagen fibers in a horse hoof or the poison-producing organelles of a rattlesnake. In the past few years a new kind of portrait has been hung in the biological museum: a portrait of the genome. In the thousands or millions of DNA base pairs, genomes can reveal secrets not only about an organism’s natural history, but its ancient history as well.