Evolution

This is a little old, but Thomas Mailund, who writes on of my favorite blogs, has posted a video interview with Svante Pääbo, the scientist leading the neanderthal genome project. At one point Pääbo addresses the question everyone's asking: did humans and neanderthals have sex? Pääbo says of course they did (why wouldn't they during the 10,000+ years they lived together), but the question is whether they produced hybrid offspring. He hopes to answer the latter question with the neanderthal genome sequence.

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Welcome to the 17th edition of the Carnival of Evolution. This month, we celebrate not only great evolution blogging around the web, but also some of the best evolution writing of all time. 150 years ago, in November of 1859, The Origin of Species was published. For our sesquicentennial celebration of this major turning point in the history of biology, I've taken a virtual voyage on the Beagle through the vast expanse of the blogosphere. And like Darwin on that first trip in the Beagle, I've kept a journal of my observations, with a little posthumous help from Charles.

In this article I am going to suggest that this arbitrary separation is meaningless.  Much like physics had to come to terms with wave-particle duality, biology must consider the same perspective where the answer depends very much on the question and how it is asked.

A few days ago, I was working at home when the phone rang. I answered, and was surprised to hear a soft, accented voice asking for me. It was Lada Tsokolova, calling from Germany, with the sad news that her husband Sergey had just died of cancer.  I was stunned. Sergey was young! He had spent nearly a year in my lab in 2005-06, on a Fulbright Fellowship, and I had seen him recently at scientific meetings in Kyoto and Heidelberg, but he never mentioned that he was ill.

 Has evolution selected the best possible features for the species existing nowadays, or has it  done a second-hand job with whatever was available?

Get your submissions in for a special, 150th Origin of Species anniversary edition of the Carnival of Evolution, going online November first. I've already received a whole slew of outstanding contributions; submit your writing and it will be in good company.

You can submit via the online submission form. If you have any problems with submission, email me via my contact form.

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A LiveScience article entitled "Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans" raises several questions of which many are simply the quest for details regarding origins and migrations.  However, there were a couple of questions that focused on other elements and warrant some consideration.
 
Question #5: Is Human Evolution Accelerating

"...saying that it remains difficult to ascertain whether or not certain genes really have recently grown in prominence because they offer some adaptive benefit."

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life 150 years ago next month, he avoided conjecture about the origin of life and "To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator" shows that he had limits on the cultural firestorm he wanted to create in the name of science.

The great diversity of male sexual traits, ranging from peacock's elaborate train to formidable genitalia of male seed beetles, is the result of female choice, say researchers from Uppsala University, but why do females choose among males? In a new Current Biology study they found no support for the theory that the female choice is connected to "good genes".

There is no consensus among biologists over the key question why females choose among males but the heart of this debate has two preferred possibilities - that female choosiness is beneficial to the females themselves or that female choice traits are favored because of 'good genes' that males contribute to female's offspring.