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03 December 2009

The Darwin/evolution round up

With the passing of the On the Origin of the Species anniversary last week, Darwin year is coming to a close.

Sadly, this means that the Tree of Life Blog itself will shortly be put into a cryogenic sleep, waiting to be awakened sometime in the future for the next big Darwin anniversary, when humans will have evolved into cyborgs and hoverboards are the kids' toy of choice.

The end is not quite here yet though, so for your delectation, here is a list of links that the Tree of Life Blog has collected over the last few months, but never got round to blogging about:

More on the International Conference on Evolution and Society that took place in Egypt a few weeks ago. Blogs from the World Federation of Science Journalists.

Belief versus acceptance: Why do people not believe in evolution? Open-access paper by James Williams at the University of Sussex School of Education.

“A unique experiment to answer the question "Does culture evolve by natural selection?". The DarwinTunes Experiment.

A US project to more precisely chart geological time scales is launching a new initiative to educate students on deep time in order to challenge religious groups who argue life was divinely made about 10,000 years ago. Nature Great Beyond Blog.

Charles Darwin really did have advanced ideas about the origin of life. Labspaces blog.

Dinosaurs and Darwin. An Interview with Peter Dodson, anatomist and fossil expert.

Professor Richard Dawkins on the New York Academy of Sciences podcast.

A zoo of video and audio from the Cambridge Darwin Festival.

David Haines, composer, performs Mr Darwin and Taxonomy from his “science oratorio” Lifetime. New Scientist.

Darwin: the geologist. Nature News.

Podcasts from the excellent Beagle Project blog.

Darwin images in the Charles Darwin Flickr group. Add your own!
And if beard Darwin, isn’t your thing, there’s a Young Darwin Flickr Group too.
(Hat-tip to the Dispersal of Darwin blog for these two)

Posted by Mun-Keat Looi at 11:01 2 Comments Make a comment
15 April 2010

Anonymous says...

no your wrong!. go home and eat some ice cream and cry about your beliefs. GO GOD!!

11 December 2009

Anonymous says...

I found this article offence, I read it in Yahoo News.(tabuismtabucur@yahoo.ca) PARIS (AFP) - Scientists in France have isolated a new giant virus that lurks inside amoeba and whose gene pool includes genetic material from other species. The virus "is a completely new viral form," said Didier Raoult, head of infectious and emerging tropical disease research at Aix-Marseille 2 University in France.


The genome of the so-called Marseillevirus encompasses a complex repertoire of genes that are "very different from the DNA of other virus forms," and shows that there is genetic exchange between other micro-organisms such a giant viruses and bacteria found in amoeba, he told AFP in an interview.


Amoeba, single-cell life forms that can be parasites on either human or animals, are acting as "a sort of cradle of creation for new viruses and bacteria," Raoult said, whose research was also published this week by the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.


Only a small number of so-called giant viruses have been discovered, the first in 1993 by accident. Unlike classic viruses, they can been viewed through a conventional light microscope.


Even now little is known about them but in 2008, a team led by Raoult even found viruses that infect other viruses so as to replicate themselves, he said.


With a genome of 368,000 basic pairs, Marseillevirus is the fifth biggest virus ever sequenced and has a diametre of 250 nanometres (around 250 millionth of a millimetre, according the a report by Raoult's for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).


The DNA of the giant virus contains material from different sources including plant and animal matter, bacteria and other giant viruses such as the Mimivirus, the report said.


"There is a mechanism of permanent creation going on in amoeba producing a new repertoire of viruses and predisposing giant viruses to become pathogens once they specialise", Raoult said.


He said the mechanism was not foreseen by Charles Darwin's theory that life comes from a common ancestor.


"The idea of a common ancestor makes no sense in the light of viruses," he said.


"That was Darwin's idea, but he was clearly wrong."

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