Update 01-03-2010: Be sure to check the plant edition of Evolving Molecular Machines over at Lab Rat’s blog! This is a story about an event that took place 2 billion years ago. With the benefit of hindsight and a great deal of human bias, we could argue that it was one of the pivotal moments [...]
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 Brown is not the colour that springs to mind when you hear the word ‘coral’. We are more accustomed to pictures of coral reefs with more aesthetically pleasing colours, like red or purple. That’s not an accurate representation of reality though: a large part of coral species has a more brownish colouring, due to the [...] Since I’m currently on a mountain retreat with my lab, I’ve spent the past few days giving presentations, learning to ski and playing games. The weather and surroundings are truly beautiful and we’re all having a great time. Because I really should be working on the assignment for tonight, I just wanted to point you [...] The 19th century must have been an exciting time to be a biologist, or a natural historian, adhering to the terminology of that time. These were the naturalists who unearthed fossils of giant reptiles and discovered what living cells are made off under their microscopes. One of the finest natural historians to have ever lived, [...] How do new species arise? That has got to be on of the most central and intriguing questions in evolutionary biology. Reproductive isolation is one of the prerequisites for speciation: if two populations keep intermingling, the populations will not diverge from one another. However, if populations become reproductively separated, both populations will eventually diverge and [...] This evolutionary tree of life has a problem. Yes, it beautifully illustrates that we are related to all life on earth, from bacteria to plants and birds. Still. there’s something wrong with it. The problem is that it is constructed from a human viewpoint. You can see that humans occupy a special position at the [...] |
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