Science-gate

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Toward Finals, Fall 2009

Workout notes I followed up this morning’s 4 miles on the elliptical with 3100 yards in the pool; the water was like brine. My lips were puckered.

5 x 100 on the 2 to warm up (1:43-47), 10 x (25 drill, 25 free) with fins, then 1650 yards:

8:13 (500), 16:23 (1000), 24:34 (1500), 27:05

then 450 cool down of various strokes. During the 1650 set, I pushed myself to catch my department chair.

My feelings weren’t too hurt that I was 12:33 slower than Grant Hackett during the 1500 Olympic semifinal.

But I was happy that I improved on my August 22, 2008 time of 27:33.

10 December 09

Here is an interesting “model” study of speciation: does speciation occur as a result of gradual change or due to a “rare” mutation?

New species might arise as a result of single rare events, rather than through the gradual accumulation of many small changes over time, according to a study of thousands of species and their evolutionary family trees. [...]

The Red Queen hypothesis rests on the idea that species must continuously evolve just to hang on to their ecological niche. That gradual evolution is driven by the constant genetic churn of sexual selection.

A consequence of this is that all of the species in a particular family, or genus, gradually evolve to form new species at the same rate.

But Mark Pagel and his team at the University of Reading, UK, challenge this idea. In a paper published today in Nature, they compared four models of speciation — one of which was the Red Queen hypothesis — to see which best explains the rate of speciation in more than 100 species groups from the animal and plant kingdoms, including bumblebees, turtles, foxes and roses.

They looked at the lengths of branches in thousands of species’ evolutionary trees contained within these groups to estimate the time periods between speciation events.

When the team compared how well the four models fitted the groups’ evolutionary histories, the Red Queen idea that species form through a catalogue of incremental changes fitted no more than 8% of the family trees.

Conversely, almost 80% of the trees fitted a model in which new species emerge from single rare evolutionary events. The Red Queen, it seems, is not running to keep up, but jumping a longer distance and then pausing for a while1.

Of course, natural selection is a dominant process (e. g., check out bacteria which resists antibiotics) but this study is examining the development of new species.

I find this interesting is that the authors of this study are attempting to fit a mathematical model to the existing evolutionary tree.

10 December 09: 4 F

I did 4 miles on the elliptical trainer followed by some stretching.

I hate Peoria, IL in the winter.

Oh well. When it gets cold, I think of this game:

I was 8 years old at the time and listened to the game on AFRTS-FEN (Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, Far East Network) with my dad. My dad liked the Packers but liked the Cowboys too; he was a bit torn. But I was so happy to listen to the game with him.

Stewart Smacks Down Gretchen Carlson, Moronic “Impeach Obama” types and other topics

Genetics: if you get this joke, you are probably the type of person that I would enjoy talking to.

Via P. Z. Myers: Here is a link to the “doctoral dissertation” of a creationist. Really; this isn’t satire. Evidently we got our degrees at the same time. (link to a pdf copy of the dissertation)

Caught red handed: Gretchen Carlson playing dumb

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Representative Grayson: Cheney should STFU.

Morons: President Obama should be impeached for…..uh…because we don’t like him?

Public Policy Polling has another mind-bending partisan number from its national survey. Right now, 20 percent of Americans “support the impeachment of President Obama for his actions so far.” That number includes 35 percent of Republicans, to only 15 percent of independents and 10 percent of Democrats.

“I’m not clear exactly what ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ they are using to justify that position,” said PPP’s Tom Jensen, “but there may be a certain segment of voters on both the right and the left these days that simply think the President doing things they don’t agree with is grounds for removal from office.”