Biogeography
Category archives for Biogeography
Triassic Life on Land: I love this book
Posted by Greg Laden on July 28, 2010 The Triassic is old. This book is new. That is a hard to beat combination.
How geology affects your dog’s demeanor and the view from your back yard
Posted by Greg Laden on July 5, 2010 Does your back yard slope up, away from your house, or does it slope down? The likelihood that your yard slopes one way or the other … statistically … depends in large part on what region you live in. (Here I’ll be speaking mainly of the US, but the principle applies broadly.) If you live…
Pink Iguanas and Disappearing Islands
Posted by Greg Laden on January 6, 2009 It turns out that a recently discovered population of land iguanas on the Galapagos is probably a new species that represents the basal (original) form of Galapagos land iguana. Moreover, this iguana is found in an unexpected place, according to a paper just coming out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).…
Neanderthals at the end of their days
Posted by Greg Laden on December 13, 2008 What was Neanderthal-Modern Human interaction really like? Fifty four teeth (some of which are fragments) and nine other bones dating to about 40-43,000 years ago represent the “most recent, and largest, sample of southern Iberian late Neanderthals currently known.” These and some closely related remains may indicate that these Middle Paleolithic holdouts were kissing cousins…
Allen’s Rule, Phenotypic Plasticity, and The Nature of Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on December 5, 2008 Allen’s Rule. One of those things you learn in graduate school along with Bergmann’s Rule and Cope’s Rule. It is all about body size. Cope’s Rule … which is a rule of thumb and not an absolute … says that over time the species in a given lineage tend to be larger and larger. Bergmann’s…
The Scientific, Political, Social, and Pedagogical Context for the claim that “Race does not exist.”
Posted by Greg Laden on November 29, 2008 These days, many people say that race is largely a social construct; while it may have a place in describing the population genetics of some species, is not particularly applicable to humans. I’m one of those people. The race concept is generally inapplicable or at best misleading when used as it often is with our…
The Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder
Posted by Greg Laden on October 22, 2008 Homo floresiensis more widely known as the “Hobbit,” may have had arms that were very different from those of modern humans. A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution explores the anatomy of H. floresiensis. To explore this we first have to understand the concept of “Humeral torsion.” Humeral torsion is…
Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting
Posted by Greg Laden on October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like…
Re-examining the cause of speciation and species diversity in the tropics
Posted by Greg Laden on July 29, 2008 Did Past Climate Changes Promote Speciation in the Amazon? Any time you’ve got a whopping big river like the Amazon (or a mountain chain like the Andes, or an ocean, or whatever), you’ve gotta figure that it will be a biogeographical barrier. Depending on the kind of organisms, big rivers, high mountains, oceans, forests, deserts,…
Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2008 There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were “human endemic cretins.” From the abstract of this paper: … We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital…