The Linnean Society of London is to publish a biological survey of the Yasuní National Park located in Ecuador’s Amazon basin. Studying an area of just two hectacres, a team of German scientists counted over a 100 different species. Most surprising was the find that ten different species of bats roosted in the zone. It is unclear how so many different species of bats coexist.
Unfortuntately, Yasuní is threatened by logging and oil and gas exploration.
My own personal fascination is with catepillars. I just think them amazing. In the first video, check out the one at the 1:10 mark and another at the 1:39 mark. Just amazing. In my native Colombia, I have seen so many amazing specimens. Frogs in Colombia are unbelieveable. The second video boasts a giant tree sloth that has to scurry for safety when its tree is felled by loggers.
Today marks the sesquicentennial of the first public debate on the topic of evolution at the Linnean Society of London. It was an event planned in haste and set off by a letter received by Charles Darwin on 18 June 1858. The letter came from Ambon in the Ternate, a group of islands known as the Moluccas, between Sulawesi and Papua New Guinea. Writing to Darwin was a young English ornithologist named Alfred Russel Wallace who had been collecting specimens throughout the Malay Archipelago. Wallace would collect over 125,000 different specimens, over 80,000 of them beetles alone. Over a thousand of them were new to science. More importantly, Wallace noticed a distinction between the fauna of islands closer to the Asian mainland and those closer to Australia, the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line.
Recovering from a bout with malaria in 1858, Wallace took the time to write to Darwin about his observations.
The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals?
Darwin read Wallace’s maunscript with alarm for he had sat on his ideas (he had discussed them with others but had never set them to paper) on natural selection since his return on the Beagle in 1841. It is thus in the fortnight between 18 June and 1 July, 1858 that Darwin wrote a quick paper that together with the Wallace manuscript were presented to the Linnean Society of London.
For the next year and half, Darwin would write feverishly and in November 1859, The Origen of Species would be published. It is, without a doubt, the greatest book ever written.
So much for the 36 year old wunder kid of the GOP, Governor Bobby Jindal has less than impressed me me twice this week. First he (and Barack Obama as well on this score) railed against the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the death penalty for child rapists. But now he has signed into law in Louisiana that allows the teaching of intelligent design in the classroom.
Louisiana public school teachers can now educate their students about the theory of intelligent design and scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolutionary theory thanks to a new law signed this week by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. The Louisiana Science Education Act now allows teachers to supplement the state’s curricula with additional scientific materials, but groups opposed to any debate over the “origin of the species” have warned that the new law will become the origin of the lawsuits if they believe it facilitates religion.
Lawmakers, however, were enthusiastically in favor of the Act signed by Jindal. The state Senate had passed the bill (SB733) with a unanimous vote, and the state House had approved it by a vote of 93-4.
The new law requires teachers to follow the standard curriculum, but allows a school district to permit a teacher to supplement his course with additional scientific evidence, analysis, and critiques regarding the scientific topics taught to his students.
One major goal of the law is to support an “open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” in public elementary and secondary schools.
“Evolutionary biologists claim that sociality is what has made humans such a successful species. We are masters at what anthropologists and others call “social intelligence.” We recognize and keep track of hundreds of relationships, and we easily distinguish between enemies and friends.
More important, we run our lives by social calculation. A favor is mentally recorded and paid back, sometimes many years later. Likewise, insults are marked down on the mental score card in indelible ink. And we are constantly bickering and making up, even with people we love.
Sarcasm, then, is a verbal hammer that connects people in both a negative and positive way. We know that sense of humor is important to relationships; if someone doesn’t get your jokes, they aren’t likely to be your friend (or at least that’s my bottom line about friendship). Sarcasm is simply humor’s dark side, and it would be just as disconcerting if a friend didn’t get your snide remarks.
It’s also easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, “Are we having fun yet?” and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy’s contribution to the future of the human gene pool.”
So it’s more about the people who “get it”, who might then become part of one’s in-group versus the people who don’t, those who remain outside, the out-group. The stronger one’s in-group, of course, the stronger the evolutionary advantage as one can activate these links for survival.
The UK Guardian reports today on a team of British psychologists working in the forests of western Uganda have recorded the first evidence of sexual politics influencing the mating calls of our closest primate ancestors. The findings are intriguing:
The findings suggest that chimpanzees are able to use their calls for more complex social communication than previously thought.
Simon Townsend, a psychologist at the University of St Andrews who led the study, said the 25 adult females in the community had apparently developed subtle tactics to either boost their reproductive success, or reduce the risks to their newborn offspring.
One of the most serious risks a chimpanzee faces is being killed at birth by an older male. Females also kill other chimps’ young if they consider them a drain on food resources or as a potential competitor for a mate.
Only 1.6% of our DNA differs from that of closest cousins, the chimapanzee and the bonobo. As Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs and Steel fame) has written we are but one species of chimpanzee. Their traits and habits are largely our own. Infantcide is common among chimpanzees as is genocide, a trait we share with our close cousins. Bonobos are more gentle but they have sex of all kinds all the live long day.
Last year, scientists at Stirling University in Scotland reported that male chimps in West Africa appeared to raid orchards and farms for fruit as gifts for their potential mates.
A 150 years ago, it was an ordinary British house mouse out for a sail and with a chance see the world. Today its ancestors are supermice.
Thank God for Darwin. Okay that is an oxymoron. But you can’t make this stuff up. Evolution is such a thing of beauty and it can be witnessed in spectacular or dreadful fashion. This is more on the lines of the dreadful. The UK Guardian reports that:
For tens of thousands of years, the birds of Gough Island lived unmolested, without predators on a remote outcrop in the south Atlantic.
Today, the British-owned island, described as the home of the most important seabird colony in the world, still hosts 22 breeding species and is a world heritage site.
But as a terrible consequence of the first whalers making landfall there 150 years ago, Gough has become the stage for one of nature’s great horror shows. Mice stowed away on the whaling boats jumped ship and have since multiplied to 700,000 or more on an island of about 25 square miles.
What is horrifying ornithologists is that the British house mouse has somehow evolved, growing to up to three times the size of ordinary domestic house mice, and instead of surviving on a diet of insects and seeds, has adapted itself to become a carnivore, eating albatross, petrel and shearwater chicks alive in their nests. They are now believed to be the largest mice in the world. Yesterday Birdlife International, a global alliance of conservation groups, recognised that the mice, who are without predators themselves, are out of control and threatening to make extinct several of the world’s rarest bird species.
Let’s send some of the supermice to the Creationists. The other alernative is this:
This is not some isolated incident, all over the world invasive species are wrecking havoc and birds are taking the brunt. In Guam, the Solomon Islands tree snake has eaten a path of devastation that has already led to many species of endemic birds into extinction.
The American whaling industry rose from modest beginnings in the late 18th century to become an international giant to feed a growing demand for whale oil for lamps and industrial lubricants. The peak year was 1846 when 735 ships and 70,000 people served the industry out of New England ports such as New Bedford and Salem. As whale stocks and reserves decreased, whalers were forced to go farther and farther from their New England home ports. Increasingly whalers were forced to round Cape Horn and venture to far off and desolate locations such Hawaii (whaling led to New England missionaries and the rest is as they say is history), Guerrero Negro on the Baja coast and up to the Bering Strait.
Today marks the 126th anniversary of the death of Charles Darwin (12 Feb 1809 -19 Apr 1882), the English naturalist whose theory of evolution remains the most singular advancement in the thought of mankind. To Darwin, we owe much. And few of mankind’s thinkers is more reviled. The lunacy of Ben Stein and his Expelled propaganda is only the last example.
I became a Darwinist sometime around the age of 14 though the seeds of my Darwinism were planted earlier in childhood. You see growing up in the Andean highlands and valleys of my native Colombia is a fertile ground for the tree of evolution to take hold. Darwinism explains the beauty and wonder of Colombia. No country on Earth a more perfect example though in truth every square centimetre of this planet is covered by the clarity and honesty of Darwinism.
In looking back on my life, it was on a day when I was ten and on which I nearly lost my life that my most cherished views began to take shape. We are the sum of our own experiences and in truth on that day sometime in the summer of 1971, my experiences took a turn deep into the natural world. My uncle Luis Bueno Figueroa was an amazing man for so many reasons but one of them is that he helped found a group of medical professionals in Colombia who for a week at a time left the comfort of their homes for the joy of forgotten Colombia, the rural areas that never received any government attention.
