A few interesting and/or important tidbits for Monday. Brian at Laelaps provides a list of some very useful books available electronically for free. Authors include slouches like Cuvier, Lyell and Huxley. PZ Myers has an excellent new column up at SEED Magazine, discussing the pufferfish genome and referring to Ryan Gregory's excellent work.
Charles Darwin collected all sorts of cool stuff (like a vampire bat, caught while feeding on his horse) on his journey aboard the Beagle, and it has to be said that he understood little of it until after he got back. The finches that bear his name were identified as such by someone else, and his own bird collections from the Galapagos were nearly worthless due to the fact that he hadn't bothered to label specimens as to their place of origin.
The wing of a bat is an amazing thing. It's not just a wing; it's clearly a modified mammalian limb. A bat looks like a lot like a rodent with really long, webbed fingers on elongated arms. Image from Animal Diversity Web at the University of Michigan.
1. A nice new Tangled Bank went up yesterday at The Beagle Project Blog, which is a cool site worth visiting at other times, too. Last week saw the unveiling of the Evangelical Manifesto, "an open declaration of who Evangelicals are and what they stand for," which seeks "to rally and to call for reform." The document has sparked some pretty intense discussion among Christians I know.
It'll be a breakout week after a slow month on the blog. To the Edge of Evolution – and beyond! Ian Musgrave over at Panda's Thumb provides a nice summary of the evolution of clotting systems and some new genomic data that could be used, by ID proponents like Michael Behe, to bolster their claims regarding the "irreducible complexity" of the clotting system.
Well, no sampler last week, so here are the answers to the last DNA content quiz.
Via John Farrell.
Last quiz on genome size, with animals chosen at random. The first quiz post explains what this is all about, the second one has additional commentary, and the answers to both previous quizzes are in previous Weekly samplers. Which organism has the larger genome? This one? Or this one? 1 2 3 4 Here's some help for you.
Answers to Quiz 2. (Poor John Farrell.) Row 1: the deer tick on the right has a genome almost 8 times the size of the ladybird beetle's (C value of 2.48 vs. 0.33). I take it that the scholars of RTB would postulate that a deer tick is many times more "advanced" than is a ladybird beetle.
Several weeks ago, a commenter (Donald) asked an interesting question about natural selection and genetic variation, and I promised to address it because I want the issue to be a theme on QoD in the coming months. Here's Donald: The blog article that Donald is citing is at The Wild Side by Olivia Judson, and the figure of 100,000 deleterious mutants for every helpful one is widely referenced.
I thought it was the coffee, or maybe the Scottish buttheadedness. But no: it's a real live syndrome. Note that this newly-described malady, SIWOTI syndrome, sounds a bit like 'snotty' or 'so what-ee', so please be careful not to offend sufferers by mispronouncing the name, or by oversimplifying the affliction with crude cartoons. Via Pharyngula, a silly little blog written by one of the syndrome's most severely-affected victims.