This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
April 29, 2013
Each week, we add some new titles of science ebooks to the Library. We will review a selection of them. Here are our newest additions:
City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There
The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of, by Lisa Song and Elizabeth McGowan
Cities may not seem like hotbeds of evolution. Tropical rain forests, maybe. The Galapagos Islands, certainly. But Central Park?
Yes, even Central Park. Wherever there is life, there is evolution. Organisms reproduce, passing down their genes to their offspring. Some variants of those genes may become more common over the generations thanks to lucky rolls of the genetic dice. But they can also become more common thanks to natural selection–because they make individuals better able to survive and reproduce than others. That advantage depends in large part on their particular environment. If the environment changes dramatically–if, for example, people cut down forests and put up skyscrapers–then a new set of mutations may give organisms an evolutionary advantage.
Continue reading “The Evolution of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse”
We’re just about to start our hangout about the coelacanth. Details are here.
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Originally published April 25, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
National Geographic, April 23, 2013
On July 30, 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists reversed time. They brought an animal back from extinction, if only to watch it become extinct again. The animal they revived was a kind of wild goat known as a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex. The bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was a large, handsome creature, reaching up to 220 pounds and sporting long, gently curved horns. For thousands of years it lived high in the Pyrenees, the mountain range that divides France from Spain, where it clambered along cliffs, nibbling on leaves and stems and enduring harsh winters.
It used to be that many people who studied animal behavior thought dogs were too weird to bother with. We had bred them far away from the “natural” state of animals, so their brain had little insight to offer us.
That’s changed a lot in in the past couple decades. We have transformed wolves into some cognitively remarkable creatures, it turns out, and the diversity of breeds we’ve produced can serve as an unplanned experiment in the genetics of social behavior.
Of course, one of the biggest rules in all science is the more data the better. Which in this case means the more dogs that scientists can study, the more they may be able to discover about them.
All of which is introduction to an article I’ve written in today’s New York Times about a new push to gather Big Data about dogs–and to provide some insights from that data to dog-owners themselves. Check it out!
Originally published April 23, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.