Tag Archives: evolution

One year on!

25 Friday Jan 2013

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Today officially marks the first anniversary of Inspiring Science, and it’s been a great year!  I think I managed to make some progress towards the goals I outlined in my first post.  Over the course of the past year, I’ve learned how to make my writing more accessible and become better at engaging with non-scientists, though unfortunately I haven’t managed to write as frequently as I would have liked.  I hope I can rectify that and continue to improve those skills, but I’m also going to try to do a better job of fostering discussion over the next 12 months.  I have a few ideas about how to do that; we’ll see how well they pan out.  (If you have a suggestion, let me know!)

If you’re one of the newer readers, why not take a romp through the archives?  There’s some good stuff buried on there that doesn’t often make it  onto the “What’s popular now?” list in the sidebar.  I’ve also picked five posts from the past year which I wish had received more attention and listed them below; I hope you’ll enjoy them.

With that said, I look forward to another year of writing about science; thanks for reading, commenting and generally keeping me company on this adventure!  If you have any suggestions about what I could do differently or better (or what I’m doing well) please leave a comment so I can learn and improve. 🙂

Hsp90: translating environmental stress into evolutionary change

16 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Development, Evolution, Form, Insects, Plants

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In the 1990s, Suzanne Rutherford and Susan Lindquist were studying fruit flies with a mutated version of the Hsp90 gene and found that the absence of this single gene led to a wide range of developmental defects.  This was surprising not only because Hsp90 isn’t directly related to development, but also because of the remarkable breadth of its impact.  Uncovering how this gene affects so many aspects of development has led to an intriguing story linking responses to environmental stress with the evolution of developmental pathways.
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Why do men and women want different things?

30 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Evolution, Humans

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Always close. (Photo credit: Hannele Luhtasela-El Showk)Regular readers will probably have realized from the links I share (or from my twitter stream) that sexism and gender issues are subjects which matter to me. Unfortunately, a lot of my discussions about gender get sidetracked by a “pop evolutionary” story based on naïve evolutionary psychology. We “evolved on the plains of Africa”, the story goes, where our preference in partners was shaped by biological needs; modern gender roles and partner preferences reflect these ancestral adaptations. It’s a nice story which does a great job of justifying the existing patriarchal structure, but is it true? That’s a huge question which is unlikely to be settled by a single study. Nevertheless, Marcel Zentner and Klaudia Mitura, a pair of psychologists at the University of York, decided to take it on. Continue reading →

Natural selection: On fitness

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Evolution, Natural Selection

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For the third part in my series about natural selection I’d like to address the concept of fitness.  Thanks to the phrase “survival of the fittest”, fitness is quite a prominent idea in the popular perception of evolution.  It was originally coined by Herbert Spencer after he read On the Origin of Species; Darwin adopted the phrase in later editions and it’s been popular ever since.  Unfortunately, this glib phrase has often eclipsed a more accurate depiction of evolution, leading to some common misunderstandings.  This confusion arises because “fitness” has a different meaning in evolutionary biology than it does in general usage.  (Have a look at the earlier posts in this series if you haven’t already read them; the first was about the different modes of natural selection and the second discussed selection mechanisms, focusing on sexual selection in particular.)

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Social wasps are specialists at recognizing faces

16 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by in Evolution, Hymenoptera, Insects, Mind

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A young female paper wasp (Image via Wikipedia)There’s lots of evidence that humans have a specialized mechanism for identifying and responding to faces; for example, people with a condition called prosopagnosia have difficulty recognizing faces but not other objects.  A few years ago, researchers showed that individual paper wasps of the species Polistes fuscatus recognize each other’s faces; the same team has now gone on to show that, like humans, P. fuscatus accomplishes this via a specialized mechanism for facial recognition rather than through general shape or pattern recognition.  This story is an excellent example of a  complex cognitive ability being exhibited by a creature with a relatively simple nervous system.

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Natural selection: selection mechanisms, sex, and the brain

08 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by in Evolution, Natural Selection

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This is second part in my series on natural selection.  In the first part, I discussed different modes of selection; in this post, I’ll explain an important mechanism of natural selection which probably doesn’t get enough attention in basic biology courses.  The idea, called sexual selection, dates back to Darwin, who dedicated over half of one of his books (The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex) to the subject.  Sexual selection is based on the struggle to reproduce rather than the struggle to survive; this already gives us a hint that the term “fitness” has a different meaning in evolutionary biology than it does in common speech, which is a subject I’ll get to in a later part of this series.

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