Rapid Evolution Can Foil Even the Best-Laid Plans

Posted on by Lori Jia

Science, May 9, 2003

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Natural selection, once seen as a stately and imperceptible process, can be speeded up to resemble a case of hyperactive jiggles. Over the past 20 years, as evolutionary biologists have begun to study natural selection in the wild, they have documented record-breaking changes in some populations of animals and plants that occur in years—not centuries or millennia.

Now conservation biologists are beginning to take note. “The last year or two have been the first time that people have really been hammering on this issue,” says Andrew Hendry of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

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The evolutionary blackbird

Posted on by Lori Jia

Nature, April 24, 2003

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The poet Wallace Stevens wrote about 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. Perhaps someday another poet will write about 13 ways of looking at the history of life. I can certainly think of 13 different scientists who have written books on the subject, each of which is coloured by its author’s expertise. Books by vertebrate palaeontologists are dominated by animals with bones, despite the fact that vertebrates make up a tiny proportion of the world’s biodiversity today — not to mention the fact that they didn’t exist for the first 3 billion years or so of life’s history.

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Adam’s Family

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, March 2, 2003

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You probably haven’t heard of the Yagnob, but Spencer Wells has. In fact, he traveled to war-torn Tajikistan to meet these Central Asian people, driving an old Soviet van over mountain passes and along dirt roads of the remote Zerafshan Valley. The Yagnob were not so hard to find 1,500 years ago. They were masters of the Silk Route, and their language was the lingua franca of trading merchants from Persia to China. But the Yagnob have dwindled, and by the time Wells reached the Zerafshan Valley, he could find only a single village where Yagnobi was still spoken.

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Tinker, Tailor: Can Venter Stitch Together a Genome From Scratch?

Posted on by Lori Jia

Science, February 14, 2003

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Craig Venter can’t stand to be bored. No sooner had he and his team at Celera Genomics finished sequencing the human genome than Venter set another modest challenge for himself: He would tackle the world’s environmental woes. His self-proclaimed goal (which landed him in newspapers and magazines around the world a few months ago) is to create microbes from scratch that can produce clean energy or curb global warming. To make this a reality, he set up a new organization, the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA) in Rockville, Maryland, right next to The Institute for Genomic Research that he founded in 1992. He got a small vote of confidence last November, when the Department of Energy awarded IBEA $3 million to take the first few steps toward that goal.

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Great Mysteries of Human Evolution

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 19, 2003

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Everything you do has a history. You wake up each morning and get out of bed using an anatomy that allowed your ancestors to stand upright at least 4 million years ago. You go to the kitchen and eat cereal with a bowl and spoon that are part of a toolmaking tradition at least 2.5 million years old. As you munch your cereal, you page through the newspaper, which you can understand thanks to a brain capable of language, abstract thought, and prodigious memory—a brain that has been expanding for 2 million years. Until a few decades ago, most of that evolutionary history was hidden from science’s view.

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