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Inspiring Science

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Inspiring Science

Tag Archives: Darwin

Speciation in Reverse

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by sedeer in Evolution

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Tags

animals, biology, birds, Darwin, evolution, finches, galapagos islands, Popular science, science, speciation

I don’t usually advertise my Accumulating Glitches posts on here, but I decided to make an exception for today’s post. It’s about a relatively straightforward study that raises a host of interesting questions which I thought some of you might find interesting. Here’s an excerpt to give you an idea:

Darwin’s finches have become a textbook example in evolutionary biology, speciating as they adapted to different environments in their spread through the Galapagos islands. In the past two decades, the opposite has been happening on Floreana island in the south of the archipelago, according to a paper published in the journal American Naturalist. The opposite of speciation, however, isn’t necessarily extinction — at least, not in the familiar sense of a species dying out. Another way for speciation to roll backwards is through hybridization, a process that raises many more (and more interesting) questions than ‘straightforward’ extinction.

Click to continue reading on Accumulating Giltches…

Ref
Kleindorfer S, O’Connor JA, Dudaniec RY, Myers SA, Robertson J, & Sulloway FJ (2014). Species collapse via hybridization in Darwin’s tree finches. The American naturalist, 183 (3), 325-41 PMID: 24561597

Before they were famous: scientist edition

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by sedeer in Science communication

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Curie, Darwin, Einstein, famous scientists, Freud, Galileo, men with beards, photography, Popular science, science, science and society, Science communication, Science in Society, scientists

There are a few scientists who are immediately recognizable even to people outside the field.  (Unfortunately, they seem to be mostly men…) It struck me that these iconic images are from later in life, when their fame was already well-established.  I decided to track down and share some pictures from when they actually did the work for which we remember them.

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All text and original images by Sedeer El-Showk. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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