Darwin Dissected

Though it may be impossible to miss, this year commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, who has justly been called the father of modern biology for this development of the theory of the evolutionary development of species. At times contentious, the fact of evolution has been long established beyond any kind of reasonable doubt - all schools of scientific knowledge are convergent in this regard. But to understand the true importance of evolution for biology as a whole, one of my favorite essays is by Theodosius Dobzhansky: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

In any case, I happen to find myself reading a facsimile of the original edition of On the Origin of Species - which I have had for many years but never read end to end. Coincidentally, the New York Times has a posted a great selection of passages by Darwin: read and enjoy.

Turning back time

A really interesting paper appeared in this weeks Nature. (Unfortunately, requires a subscription to access the full paper, but you can get a copy at a local bookstore.) The authors used phylogeny based statistical techniques to reconstruct ancestral proteins for several bacteria. The results independently show (and collaborate other evidence) for paleotemperature trends from as far back as 3.5 billion years.

Phylogeny based ancestral protein sequencing is not fool-proof, but the evidence seems convergent: the seas were considerably warmer billions of years ago (30 degrees Celsius seems likely) during the early development of life.

Becoming human

BecomingHuman.org is a web-based presentation on paleoanthropology. It is a great example of how interactive multimedia can be a much better learning tool than television. Of course, this also requires active engagement on the part of the user, which makes the target audience necessarily smaller. If every university department produced one introductory resource like this, the world would be a much richer place.