Wednesday Wiki: The Bone Wars
The Bone Wars occurred during a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. Each scientist also attacked the other in scientific publications, seeking to ruin his credibility and have his funding cut off.
Is there more to heredity, natural selection, and evolution than genes and DNA
Eva Jablonka asks if there is more to heredity, natural selection, and evolution than genes and DNA?:
Growing evidence indicates there is more to heredity than DNA, that heritable non-DNA variations can take place during development, sometimes in response to an organism's environment. The notion of soft inheritance is returning to reputable scientific inquiry. Moreover, there seem to be cellular mechanisms activated during periods of extreme stress that trigger bursts of genetic and non-genetic heritable variations, inducing rapid evolutionary change. These realizations promise to profoundly alter our view of evolutionary dynamics.
Bioinformatics: the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated
Lincoln Stein updates his 2003 prediction that bioinformatics would be dead in ten years:
In February 2003 I gave a keynote address for the second annual O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference called 'Bioinformatics: Gone in 2012' in which I predicted that bioinformatics as a discipline separate from mainstream biology would be gone in ten years. My talk was met with resentment, disappointment and stunned disbelief by an audience of computer geeks who had come to the conference for the express purpose of getting in on the hot new thing. Worse, this was the year in which biotech and pharma realized they had significantly overinvested in bioinformatics and started large-scale layoffs. In the light of a downsized bioinformatics market, the O'Reilly publishing house cancelled a series of planned bioinformatics textbooks, and never sponsored another Bioinformatics Technology Conference. It seemed as though my predictions had come true ten years early, and although I knew it was all coincidental, I couldn't suppress the sinking feeling that I was the villain who triggered the collapse.
Geneticists in 1953
Speakers at the International Union of Biological Sciences, Symposium on Genetics of Population Structure in Pavia, Italy, in 1953. How many big-name geneticists can you name (Haldane, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Mayr, Waddington, E.B. Ford)?
Migration: An engine for social change
In today's Nature, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that migration is an engine of social change because the movement of people into societies that offer a better way of life is a more powerful driver of cultural evolution than conflict and conquest (pay-access only, sorry!):
As cultural evolutionists interested in how societies change over the long term, we have thought a lot about migration, but only recently tumbled to an obvious idea: migration has a profound effect on how societies evolve culturally because it is selective. People move to societies that provide a more attractive way of life and, all other things being equal, this process spreads ideas and institutions that promote economic efficiency, social order and equality.
The great divide in Anthropology
Today, anthropology is at war with itself. The discipline has divided into two schools of thought - the social anthropologists and the evolutionary anthropologists. The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career.
New Simonyi Chair appointed – Marcus du Sautoy
The University of Oxford has announced that Professor Marcus du Sautoy will be replacing Richard Dawkins in the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science (story).
This is great news - I saw him give a talk last year and he was fantastic. The Guardian has an old (2003!) profile piece on him here: The indivisible man, and his webpage is here
(thanks for the heads-up Fi!)