Giant clams are in the news today, helping to drive the expansion of modern humans out of Africa. Can we believe it? The paper (Richter et al., 2008) describes a new species of giant clam, distinct from others in reproductive cycle, habitat preference and size. This new species is mainly found in shallow water reefs. Today, the species makes up a very small proportion of the total Red Sea giant clam count. Before the last ...

How are languages and genes related to each other? Anthropology is an interdiscipinary subject, and this is probably the topic that pushes that envelope the furthest, in terms of calling on the expertise of many different disciplines in the humanities and sciences. As an organizing principle, many workers have begun with the hypothesis that languages and genes each form genealogical relationships among populations, and that the coevolution of languages and populations should make these genealogies ...

I have an excellent e-mail question about last week’s Neandertal mtDNA paper, which has provoked a lot of commentary. I just skimmed over your comments on the recent paper and I have a couple questions. First, how many Neanderthals did they receive mitochondrial DNA from? I think I read somewhere that it was fewer than ten. Second if that is true, what the hell does it mean? I wouldn’t try and predict anything based on ...

The BBC has a story about Y chromosome matches between German Bronze Age skeletons and a couple of guys living in the same area now: "I didn't expect it at all, to end up being the direct descendant of the cavemen. It's amazing, especially as on that particular day I had such a dry mouth, I thought the DNA sample wouldn't work," he said. Looks like the Y chromosome equivalent of the Cheddar Man mtDNA ...

Do people taste calcium? By measuring the electrical activity of nerves linking the brain and tongue in mice, "we can now say with some certainty that calcium is tasted," Tordoff said. There's an interesting genetic story here, with a high-calcium mouse strain showing activity in a calcium receptor not previously known to be expressed in the tongue. Who knows what other things gene expression studies are going to find?

Sharon Begley covers a recent paper by Joanna Mountain on Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralists: The novel mutation arose in eastern Africa about 10,000 years ago and was carried by migration to southern Africa about 2,000 years ago not by Bantu-speakers, in whom the mutation is absent, but in speakers of what’s called the Nilotic language. These unsuspected ancestors first brought herds of animals to southern Africa before the Bantu migration. To me, this ...

The Boston Globe runs a piece on "open science" (big in the Boston area) and hits on an obvious problem: Scientists who plunge into openness also risk giving a competing lab a leg up. "Maybe somebody has discovered some interesting gene and doesn't want to blab to the whole world about why it's interesting," said Michael Laub, an assistant professor of biology at MIT. He says his lab is not overly secretive, but does not ...

I missed this op-ed by David Barash when it came out last month. It is an argument that commentators on the political left would prefer to ignore evolution just as those on the right, but for reasons having to do with innateness: Indeed, ideologues of both stripes seek to have it both ways: denying evolution when they choose, but, when convenient, twisting its insights to support their causes. Accordingly, some on the political right have ...

I'm featured in an article in U.S. News and World Report, by Nancy Shute. It was a great interview, and she's put together our work on recent acceleration with some questions about where human evolution is headed. She also cites work by Simon Baron-Cohen, Gregory Wray and Nick Bostrom. It's a nice group to talk about recent and ongoing changes in human biology. I have to say one thing about being interviewed for the story ...

This is the first of a four-part series on blogging and tenure. Each installment covers a different portion of the tenure process, from starting and establishing the tone of your blog, up to documenting your blog for your tenure dossier. I don't guarantee anything, and I certainly don't have all the answers, but I worked hard to develop some strategies in my tenure chase, and you may find some of them helpful. Last month, the ...

Is there anything surprising about finding the Cambridge Reference Sequence in Paglicci 23? read more

Another Flickr find, Liang Bua cave, by Rosino (Creative Commons Share-alike license)

Some months ago I was taking some notes about Neandertal pigment use, drawn from a recent article by Marie Soressi and Francesco d'Errico. I got distracted and didn't finish writing them up at the time. Recently, a number of readers have asked for my thoughts on the article, "The Mythical Moderns," by Robert Bednarik. It is very much worth doing, particularly since a couple of prominent news articles have returned to the issue of "out ...

The keywords to the article include, "carnivorous marsupial" and "precocious breeding." What better teaser could you possibly hope for? Tasmanian devils are dying because of a transmissible cell line infection, or "cancer," decimating their population. In fact, in some places it's killing 9 out of 10, which is way beyond decimation. The new paper by Menna Jones and colleagues claims that the population is evolving toward a radical life history solution to the problem: Tasmanian ...

Larry Moran comments on the Gene Wiki. (If you haven't read about it, check out this AP article, or the PLoS Biology paper). Larry has written before about the errors in sequence databases and how hard it is to fix them, he's one of the people with the most practical experience trying to find ways to remove errors. His posts are a good way to learn about the limits of these resources. I've seen several ...