Fellow blogger, Simon Greenhill of HENRY, and co-authors published a cool paper evaluating language evolution that just came out in today’s issue of Science. The premise behind the paper, “Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts,” is simple to follow. By comparing related versions, or homologs, of common words between the following language families: Indo-European, Bantu, and [...]
Entries from January 2008
January 31, 2008
Gorillas with Weapons and Mirror Neurons & Macaques
If you don’t follow my other blog but are interested in tool use, I just blogged about gorillas who have been seen using clumps of grass and branches as weapons as well as the new research which links macaque tool use and mirror neurons at Primatology.net.
John Hawks also covered the macaque & mirror neuron linkage [...]
January 31, 2008
The adaptive strategies behind music and violence
I’ve got a couple pseudo-science, evolutionary psychological news bits to share with you. The first is coverage of Alan Harvey music evolutionary theory that he presented at the Annual Australian Neuroscience Meeting. From the article,
“[Alan Harvey] says music is not just a pretty sound, but also a way of communicating that is just as important [...]
January 30, 2008
How chimpanzee and human diets affect gene expression
Even though I read the classic 1975 Science paper by Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson, where they demonstrated through comparative protein analysis, that chimpanzees and humans are genetically 99% identical, I was still shocked to read the results of the initial draft of the chimpanzee genome when it came out in September 2005. Like many [...]
January 30, 2008
Four Stone Hearth XXXIII @ Greg Laden
The 33rd edition of the anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth is now up and running at Greg Laden, and comes with this recommendation from Greg…
This is an exceptionally outstanding set of posts for this or any carnival. I’m sure you will enjoy visiting and reading each and every one of these submissions.
He also includes [...]
January 28, 2008
Identifying Cis-Acting Elements that regulate Human Gene Expression
Today, I used Athena, a web app that lets one check out and compare promoter sequences in Arabidopsis, for my Functional Genomics class. You can check out the Bioinformatics publication that announces this cool tool, if you want. But I must admit it is not really applicable to the rest of this post… the only [...]
January 26, 2008
The PCR Song by Scientists for Better PCR
One more video to share with you, this time it is an advertisement for a type of machine called a thermal cycler, that I’ve been using a lot for last five months. And by a lot I mean I’ve used one almost every day to run a super top secret set of PCR reactions for [...]
January 25, 2008
A video documenting 527 million years of evolution
Seems like to today is turning into the film Fridays that I always looked forward to early on in my education. You probably deserve a break from this week’s blogging. This video that I’ll be sharing with you has many flaws, but it is a creative way to visualize the evolutionary processes. I don’t particularly [...]
January 25, 2008
Zimmer & Shubin on Limb Evolution
If you read the overview on limb evolution that I wrote yesterday, I think you maybe interested in watching this 51 minute conversation between Carl Zimmer and Neil Shubin that the Panda’s Thumb pointed too.
January 24, 2008
The majority of the human genome evolved about 500 million years ago
One of the hallmarks of human evolution, aside from our bipedalism and extraordinarily large brains, are our forelimbs… especially the famed prehensile thumb. Our forelimbs, or arms, are extremely flexible compared to a quadruped. For example, because of the shallowness of the ball and socket joint that connects our humerus to our scapula, our arms [...]
