In the news today

Some sciencey stories that have caught my eye this week:

A paper in Genome Research describes the sequencing of the entire mitochodrial genome of the extinct thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. This probably deserves it's own post: it uses new methods and the results are surprisingly different from the sequences previously available. I'll try to review it in more depth later...

Scientific American reports on the discovery of two species of fly in Namibia which are members of a genus previously only known from the fossil record. This is pretty cool, especially given my personal soft spot for Namibia. Maybe I have unknowingly inhaled one of these flies! I am however a little disappointed that the good folk at Scientific American have described the flies as "living fossils". The term is not helpful. If a fly is alive it isn't a fossil. And where should the line be drawn? Many extant species have close relatives known from the fossil record. Are they all "living fossils"? How much divergence is required before they are no longer classed as "living fossils"? I think terms like this can really confuse people.

ABC news reports on the births of ten Tasmanian Devil pups on an island sanctuary. The pups are the offspring of devils chosen for captive breeding because of their good genetics. They have similar genetic profiles to the famous Cedric, a devil who raised, then dashed, the hopes of researchers by first showing immunity to the devastating Devil Facial Tumour Disease, only to later contract the cancer. Maybe these pups will show greater resilience to the disease?

And finally I can't resist posting a link to this: BBC footage of bears catching dead fish with their feet! Apparently they don't like to get their ears wet :-)

Darwin Day

As I described in my previous post, I've not been in quite the right frame of mind for blogging these last few days, my thoughts have been elsewhere. So my planned post for Darwin Day has been deferred as I've not put in the necessary reading. But I still wanted to mark the occasion. Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Darwin Day is "a global celebration of science and reason" held around Darwin's birthday each year. This year is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species...". At work we celebrated with Darwin-themed cakes and a few candles. But I said I'd blog today... can I come up with something interesting on the fly?

After all these years, how does society regard the legacy of Darwin? That's what I wanted to cover. I could list the essential contribution of Darwin's ideas to the development of modern biology and analyse Theodosius Dobzhansky's assertion that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. I could debate the future for evolutionary thinking and science in the US under the new Obama government, challenged as it is by the creationist and intelligent design lobbies. But so many others have written good, thoughtful posts on these topics already and here, in the last couple of hours of Darwin Day in Australia, I don't have the time to come up with any deep thinking or novel insights of my own. So I'll turn, as do so many of my generation (and so many of my students) to Google for some insight. I've just this moment performed a Google search for "Charles Darwin". If anything will reflect the popular legacy of Darwin today it will surely be the top ten hits I get on Google... right?

First up is a news story from the Telegraph in England. Darwin's home, Down House, is re-opening to the public on Darwin Day, following renovations. So Darwin is sufficiently well known and interesting that people will travel and spend money to see where he lived. I guess that is nothing surprising, but perhaps encouraging for Darwin fans to know that people care.

Second is Wikipedia, of course. But Google anything today and you will surely get a Wikipedia entry in the first few hits, so not much to glean from this.

Next is AboutDarwin.com. This is one of many websites dedicated to the man. Here you can find info on his life, his travels, his writings and people he knew and worked with. Today the homepage is decorated with a birthday cake and balloons. I wonder if he would have appreciated the thought?

Fourth is a biography of Darwin at Lucidcafe. It is short but seems to cover the basics well as far as I can tell at a glance and there are plenty of related links.

Fifth is a link to a list of blog posts on Darwin. This doesn't surprise me, especially today, as he pops up everywhere in the blogosphere, in scientific blogs and in blogs on what I shall simplistically refer to as "evolution vs religious fundamentalism". Likewise, the sixth is a link to a list of Darwin's books. Again, no great surprise.

Finally, the seventh hit, we get to that wonderful resource: The complete work of Charles Darwin online. Want to know what Darwin wrote about something? Look here. It's open access and it does what it says on the tin, with a handy user guide.

In eighth and ninth are two more brief biographies and in tenth a link to "On the Origin of Species..." on Google Books.

So, most of the top ten hits are either biographical links or academic links to Darwin's writings. I like this. Darwin was an academic and it seems only correct that the top ten hits (realistically this is as far as many people will look) include so many links to the works of the man himself. Amongst all the serious scholarship, so much rubbish is written today about what "Darwinism" really is that it can be hard for those new to evolutionary theory to figure out which sources to trust. So where better to start than with what he actually said. Then take it from there.

Out of interest I scrolled through a few more pages of results and found mostly more of the same. A mention perhaps to the Charles Darwin Foundation for science in the Galapagos at number 12, and Charles Darwin University in Australia at number 15. Nice to see his name is out there still.

In the news today

Well, there are lots of things in the news today of course, but two in particular caught my eye.

First, one of my all-time favourite people I've never met, Sir David Attenborough, on receiving hate mail from religious fundamental types. Sir David Attenborough: 'I get hate mail telling me to burn in hell for not crediting God'.

Sir David also said it was "terrible, terrible" when creationism and evolution were taught in schools as equivalent, alternative perspectives.

"It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066."

I'm with Sir David on this one!



Second, a bit of "well I never!" or "how cool is that!". A NSW couple got to see a red belly black snake eat a brown snake - cool enough alone you might think - but THEN the brown snake managed to escape from the belly of the red belly black by exiting head-first from its mouth. Now that is seriously cool!

Mr Barton reckons that somehow the brown snake turned itself around inside the black snake.

"When you tell these stories no-one believes you, but I have the photographs," he said.

I have seen both these snakes in the wild, but never doing anything quite so exciting. Although S did a good job of almost stepping on a brown snake on a bushwalk late last year - that was exciting for us! Here's a nice red belly black I befriended (from a safe distance) at Jervis Bay a couple of years back: