Sagar: Hovind in all his glory!

"Dr." Kent Hovind goes around the country giving presentations on why scientists are wrong about evolution and why the world really was created 6000 years ago. We mentioned Hovind a while back, and I just watched one of Hovind's presentations on youtube. The link is here . Besides just being funny, this clip is unique from other clips and debates we have seen in that you get to see a Creationist present to a pro-Creationist audience. The jokes and rhetorical choices he makes are definitely not ones that would work amongst most university audiences. If you have time, you should definitely check this person out.

Bytheway, Hovind has an amusement park where he portrays dinosaurs and humans living together at the same time. No joke here. Just thought you should know.

Dino Comics (from Joy)

Click on the comic to read it in full. So, this is tangentially related, but awesome and silly. This is from qwantz.com. You should read them everyday, I do. The humor might be a little hard to get into at first, but you will soon realize that they are smart and clever! Trust me. (oh and also this week is guest comics week, so they aren't like normal...go back in the archive a bit.) So it is revealed. I am a comics nerd.

Sagar's New and Hot (Week 7)

Darwin did a lot of letter writing. I mean a LOT. Nearly 14,500 of his letters exist today. I know we have talked earlier about the Darwin Correspondence Project, which tries to collect all of Darwin's correspondence, but today, all of Darwin's correspondence which has been stored by the Project offline has debuted online. The database contains more than 50,000 pages of text and 45,000 images. The actual letters are housed in University of Cambridge. Maybe we should go?

The website for the database is found here , and an article about the database is found here .

Roarke's New and Hot (Week 7)

In news related to last week's discussion about genetic engineering, doctors in Britain have this week received governmental support for cosmetic genetic screens for the first time. A couple with a history of a genetic disorder that causes involuntary squinting requested that the Bridge Center Family Clinic in London screen embryos for the disorder and choose one that does not carry the allele for the disease. This marks the first time that doctors have been allowed to conduct a genetic screen of embryos for a non-life-threatening disorder. While critics argue that this is the beginning of a trend that will lead to the genetic engineering of "perfect babies," supporters contend that even seemingly non-life-threatening disorders can lead to severe distress, financial strain, and even suicide.
Read the article here.

Roarke

Anne's New and Hot - week 7

As many of you know I had the opportunity to spend a couple weeks in the Galapagos while I was living in Venezuela. I went twice, and my trips there were probably the most memorable travel experiences I have ever had. When visitors travel to the Galapagos there are always experienced naturalists on the crew. I still remember the naturalist on our trip as being absolutely amazing and fantastic. After our trip, my family kept in touch for a while and we even arranged for him to visit us in Venezuela. Gradually though, we lost touch. I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to find him and get back in touch, and I was able to find his e-mail. He doesn't do as many Galapagos tours now and is involved in other projects, but when he does he focuses particularly on Darwin. I haven't found out much more than that yet, but I plan on continuing the correspondence. If any of you have anything that you would like to find out about, I would love it if you would generate some questions to ask him! I'll keep you all updated on what I find out!

I included some information about Klaus, our naturalist and some pictures from our trip with him.

Klaus Fielsch
Born in Quito to a German-Ecuadorian family, Klaus Fielsch went on to study at Montclair State University in New Jersey and New York State University (becoming trilingual in English, Spanish and German). Pursuing a lifelong interest in nature, Klaus started working as a naturalist guide in Ecuador’s upper Amazon Basin in 1989, was assistant director of a biological research station in Cuyabeno along the Aguarico River in 1991, and has been working full time as a naturalist guide in Galápagos for over a decade. Klaus is also an avid mountaineer, surfer and diver and recently served as the naturalist guide for the filming of Master and Commander. He is now in much demand as a guide for TV nature specials on Galápagos.

Joy's New and Hot, Week 7

Evolutionary Trees and Math

My article comes from Sciencnews.org and is about how geometry and topology are helping biologists make better use of evolutionary trees. It begins with a hypothetical situation: an oceanographer buys whale meat at a market in Japan, and is told that it is the meat of species that can be legally killed. He tests it only to determine that it is from an endangered species, which it is a crime to kill. The oceanographer goes to the authorities and is faced with this question: how sure is he that it is actually the endangered species?

Until recently, this could be a large problem, since the genome of all whales hasn't been mapped. Using evolutionary trees could be problematic because if the data provides evidence pointing towards different trees, the biologist has to determine between these which is the best. If the different trees are relatively close together, getting it wrong might not be too bad, but if the trees are far apart this could be a problem. However, Susan Holmes, a statistician here at Stanford (I always think it's cool when I read about people from here in the news), and mathematicians Louis Billera and Karen Vogtmann from Cornell have developed a new way to use evolutionary trees to determine more accurately to what species a certain creature belongs.

They made a sort of evolutionary "forest" out of the trees, creating a three dimensional representation. The biologist can take his average evolutionary tree, and trace the shortest line between it and the surrounding trees to see what his average tree is most closely related to and then pick a more accurate match for his mystery species. I'm gonna be honest, the article talks about negative curvature and some stuff I don't quite understand about the math. However, I just think it's neat to look at how different fields intersect and use one another, like math helping out biology. The researchers have used this method to create a free software program that's going to be added to a statistics program called R that biologists are already using. They are currently working on developing more accurate algorithms.

Dani's New & Hot :: Rovers & Sitters

My new & hot this week is an article in Medical News Today this past Monday.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=70449

The article talks about research on fruit flies that may shed light on the issue of if survival of the fittest is true, then why is there is so much natural genetic diversity. It is an interesting paradox; you'd think that if the best fit survived, when all the surviving individuals in the long run would have very similar genomes. However, as can be seen on all levels of organisms, genetic diversity runs rampant and also allows natural selection to occur.

Anyway, the article explains how there are two types of foraging genes in fruit flies (which are also found in humans...I wonder what we forage for...), the Rover gene and the Sitter gene. The experiment involve the idea of "negative frequency-dependent selection," which says that individuals that are not the same as everyone else has a better chance of surviving. The experiment found that Rovers in a population predominated by Sitters survive better and that Sitters in a population predominated by Rovers have higher survival rates. This is because these unique individuals in the population have unique ways of finding food and thus are competitively advantageous. This data shows that there isn't always one best fit variant, but that one variation helps to promote the other, and thus genetic diversity is maintained in the population, and natural selection can occur.