Evolution

A key riddle surrounding the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors but a study appearing in the Journal of Biological Chemistry says researchers in Italy have reconstructed one of the earliest evolutionary steps yet; generating long chains of RNA from individual subunits using nothing but warm water. 

Many researchers believe that RNA was one of the first biological molecules present, before DNA and proteins, but there has been little success in recreating the formation on RNA from simple "prebiotic" molecules that likely were present on primordial earth billions of years ago.

If you haven't watched NOVA's 3-part special on human evolution, you're missing out. It's all online, so you have no excuse for missing it.

It's visually amazing and the science is explained clearly. The series gives an outstanding overview of where the field of human evolution is now - what the evidence is, what the outstanding questions are, and what are the most promising answers to those questions at present.

After 3 hours, you'll have a great basic grasp of human evolution.

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Drug resistant infectious organisms pose a very serious threat to society, and are perhaps one of the biggest challenges that medical researchers face in their fight to keep people healthy.

Despite the trouble that antibiotic resistance has caused for modern medicine over the years, researchers at the University of Gothenburg are taking on an innovative project that may help put this evolutionary phenomenon in check.

Sunday Science Book Club

The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin

As scientific research steps forward, the reasons for our choices, our decisions, our feelings are studied from all sides, to the point where there isn’t much left of our free-will. Why should it be so? So why do our feelings fool us around? Are we actors of our lives or do we only act the way our genetic inheritance has decided for us?

Biology consists of much detailed information regarding genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and a variety of other components.  This has provided a great deal of insight into how life functions, evolves, and reproduces.  However, there are other realms of biology that attempt to find order where perhaps none exists.  In discussions of topics like "selfish genes", or "kin selection", or Hamilton's rule, we are getting into areas where causation is being sought where none may specifically exist or at least, not of a general type.

The concept of altruism, a selfless concern for the welfare of others, a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core aspect of various religious traditions,  has long been debated in philosophical circles.  More recently, evolutionary biologists have joined the debate, saying that altruism may have evolved because any action that improves the likelihood of a relative's survival and reproduction increases the chance of an individual's DNA being passed on.

In an earlier article titled What is Life?, I took the reader through a reasoning process to finally arrive at the conclusion that, contrary to general expectation, finding a definition of life is not an overwhelmingly difficult problem at all because life  is a remarkably simple concept – independent spontaneous cooperation.
I think that finding a definition has been seen as difficult because those considering it have confused the definition with the underlying significance of life, which some might call life’s purpose, when the two are almost separate questions.
This confusion, this perception that life is just too hard to explain, has reduced our most inspiring thinkers to the status of mere mortals.

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.