Question: If Paul Ehrlich was wrong, why shouldn’t we just assume that Henry Gee is too?
extinction
Science writer: Extinctions don’t necessarily lead to new diversity
Black’s essay is a tribute to “accidental evolution,” as if no serious explanation is required for the complex means by which boundaries are transcended.
Fast evolution linked to extinction
Anyone who hopes for great things from the possibility that evolution can work very quickly needs to read this.
New findings on the devolution of tuskless elephants
Why were two-thirds of the tuskless babies females? “They also suspected that the relevant gene was dominant – meaning that a female needs only one altered gene to become tuskless — and that when passed to male embryos, it may short-circuit their development.”
Can the fallout from mass extinctions enable prediction of patterns in evolution?
The description of the research makes clear that evolution is seen as an intelligent agent, like a coach deploying players. “Think of this as the biosphere’s version of choosing starters and benchwarmers based on height and weight more than skill after losing a big match. There may well be a logic to this game plan in the arc of evolution.” But can evolution be both mindless and a strategic coach?
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne says they’ll never clone a herd of mammoths
Coyne: What they’d get would be a genetic chimera, an almost entirely Asian elephant but one that is hairier, chunkier, and more tolerant of cold. That is NOT a woolly mammoth, nor would it behave like a woolly mammoth, for they’re not inserting behavior genes.
Was the “demon duck of doom” a “huge evolutionary experiment”?
Evolution is described in this story as if it was some sort of lesser god, making lower level decisions.
Honeybees, astonishingly, are not going extinct
Science writer Hank Campbell vs. the apocalypse industry: Instead of dying out, there are now 10 honeybees for every human on the planet – more than 25 years ago. And that is just in one species. There are over 25,000 species of bees, we just don’t try to count them all because the others are not part of a billion dollar industry, like sending honeybees around in trucks to pollinate almond farms.
It turns out, 17 plants, thought extinct in Europe, have turned up again
The Darwinian focus on “species” and speciation may be a handicap here. Not only are extinction listings fluid but so, probably, are a lot of species. No doubt there will be other surprises as well. Nice ones.
A psychologist weighs in on the Neanderthal extinction
Of course, it’s all very interesting. That is why we listen. But a dozen different theories are called “science” only out of courtesy. And it’s not clear that Coolidge and Overmann’s thirteenth theory (if that’s the count) is any improvement.
Asteroid hit dino extinction theory strengthened by asteroid dust found in crater
The asteroid theory replaced any number of folk Darwinian theories about why the dinosaurs died out. You know the sort of thing: They were too big; they were too stupid to look after their eggs; mammals ate their eggs… Etc. Many non-dinos went extinct too. Small mammals may have found it easier to hide.
A comet, not an asteroid, killed the dinosaurs, say astrophysicists
At Smithsonian Mag: Siraj and co-author Avi Loeb concluded from their analysis that Jupiter’s gravitational field was strong enough to bump many such long-period comets from the Oort cloud off course, bringing them very close to the Sun.
From the Smithsonian: Top Ten Dino Discoveries of 2020
The Top Ten are not numbered but #4 from the top is “Dinosaurs Weren’t in Decline When the Asteroid Hit. The thing that still puzzles many of us is, if dinosaurs weren’t in decline, why did they ALL die out?
Tens of thousands of rock paintings from 12,500 ya discovered in Colombia
From The Guardian: Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.
Asked at The Conversation: Could dinosaurs re-evolve?
We are told no. But just a minute. According to the story, some dinos evolved into birds. If so, massive changes ARE possible. It’s not clear why changed circumstances could not cause some of those changes to be reversed.