Lifeboat Foundation

Monkeyflowers glow in a rich assortment of colors, from yellow to pink to deep red-orange. But about 5 million years ago, some of them lost their yellow. In the Feb. 10 issue of Science, UConn botanists explain what happened genetically to jettison the yellow pigment, and the implications for the evolution of species.

Monkeyflowers are famous for growing in harsh, mineral-rich soils where other plants can’t. They are also famously diverse in shape and color. Monkeyflowers also provide a textbook example of how a single-gene change can make a new species. In this case, a monkeyflower species lost the yellow pigments in the petals but gained pink about 5 million years ago, attracting bees for pollination. Later, a descendent species accumulated mutations in a gene called YUP that recovered the yellow pigments and led to production of red flowers. The species stopped attracting bees. Instead, hummingbirds pollinated it, isolating the red flowers genetically and creating a new species.

UConn botanist Yaowu Yuan and postdoctoral researcher Mei Liang (currently a professor at South China Agricultural University), with collaborators from four other institutes, have now shown exactly which gene changed to prevent monkeyflowers from making yellow. Their research, published this week in Science, adds weight to a theory that new genes create phenotypic diversity and even new species.

New work shows that histones, long treated as boring spools for DNA, sit at the center of the origin story of eukaryotes and continue to play important roles in evolution and disease.

Evolution’s rapid pace after the Cambrian explosion

Though the work of Schopf and other paleobiologists continues to fill in the Precambrian fossil record, questions remain about the pace of the Cambrian explosion. What triggered life to evolve so fast?

The question has intrigued scientists of many disciplines for decades. Interdisciplinary collaboration has wrought a wealth of evidence from diverse perspectives — geochemical, paleoenvironmental, geological, anatomical, and taxonomic — that describes how biological organisms evolved in concert with changing environmental conditions.

A scan of the skull of a 319-million-year-old fossilized fish has led to the discovery of the oldest example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain, shining a new light on the early evolution of bony fish.

The fossil of the skull belonging to the extinct Coccocephalus wildi was found in a coal mine in England more than a century ago, according to researchers of the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The fossil is the only known specimen of the fish species so scientists from the University of Michigan in the US and the University of Birmingham in the UK used the nondestructive imaging technique of computed tomography (CT) scanning to look inside its skull and examine its internal bodily structure.

Transhumanism is the idea that technology and evidence-based science can and should be used to augment and improve humans in order to overcome the limitations that evolution has left us with. As the name suggests, it stems from humanism, but it adds an optimism that cognitive and physical improvement is both possible and desirable.

On the face of it, the idea that humans should be permitted to use technology to live healthier and happier lives does not sound dangerous, or even contentious. But it does provoke strong opposition: in 2004, Francis Fukuyama called transhumanism “the world’s most dangerous idea”. The force of that claim is somewhat undermined when you consider how wildly wrong his previous big idea turned out to be: in 1992 he declared that because the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, history had come to an end. Nevertheless, Fukuyama is not alone in fearing transhumanism.

Some people object to transhumanism because they think we should strive to be “natural”, and to be content with what evolution – or their god — have given us. But of course the definition of what is “natural” changes over time. Nature didn’t endow us with spectacles, and few people now argue they should be banned. Now we have cochlear implants, and many people feel that their smartphones are extensions of themselves. In the future we will have the option of raising our IQ with smart drugs or with gene therapy, and these will be hotly debated.

Sometimes to know what the matter is, you have to find it first. When the universe began, matter was flung outward and gradually formed the planets, stars and galaxies that we know and love today. By carefully assembling a map of that matter today, scientists can try to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe.

A group of scientists, including several with the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today.

Combining data from two major telescope surveys of the universe, the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope, the analysis involved more than 150 researchers and is published as a set of three articles Jan. 31 in Physical Review D.

God, they say, is in the details. But could God also be in our frontal lobes? Every culture from the dawn of humankind has imagined planes of existence beyond the reach of our senses, spiritual domains that shape our Earthly experiences. Why do beliefs of the fantastic hold such powerful sway over our species? Is there something in our evolutionary history that points to an answer? Does neuroscience hold the key? Straddling the gap between science and religion, Brian Greene is joined by renowned neuroscientists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists, to explore one of the most profound mysteries of our existence.

PARTICIPANTS: Lisa Barrett, Barbara J. King, Zoran Josipovic, Steven Pinker.

Continue reading “The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct” »

(http://www.evol-net.fr/index.php?option=com_tlpteam&view=team&id=2&Itemid=559) is a Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the French state research organization and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.

Dr. Bapteste has both a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Pierre and Marie Curie University and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of biology from Pantheon-Sorbonne University.

Continue reading “Dr. Eric Bapteste, Ph.D. — CNRS/AIRE — Interactomics For Deeper Understanding Of Aging And Evolution” »

Evolution of multicellularity from early unicellular ancestors is arguably one of the most important transitions since the origin of life^1,2. Multicellularity is often associated with higher nutrient uptake³, better defense against predation, cell specialization and better division of labor⁴. While many single-celled organisms exhibit both solitary and colonial existence^3,5,6, the organizing principles governing the transition and the benefits endowed are less clear. Using the suspension-feeding unicellular protist Stentor coeruleus, we show that hydrodynamic coupling between proximal neighbors results in faster feeding flows that depend on the separation between individuals. Moreover, we find that the accrued benefits in feeding current enhancement are typically asymmetric– individuals with slower solitary currents gain more from partnering than those with faster currents. We find that colony-formation is ephemeral in Stentor and individuals in colonies are highly dynamic unlike other colony-forming organisms like Volvox carteri ³. Our results demonstrate benefits endowed by the colonial organization in a simple unicellular organism and can potentially provide fundamental insights into the selective forces favoring early evolution of multicellular organization.

Suspension-feeding unicellular protists inhabit a fluid world dominated by viscous forces that limit prey transport for feeding ^3,7,8. Using either flagella or cilia, many of these organisms generate microcurrents that actively transport dissolved nutrients and smaller prey critical for their nutrition ^3,9,10. A protist’s ability to favorably alter its feeding current so as to enhance feeding rate would therefore be beneficial to its survival. Can colony formation enable unicellular protists to enhance their feeding flows? Colonial protists have been suggested to generate stronger flows by combining individual feeding microcurrents of neighboring colony members. Colony forming protists can broadly be classified into two categories depending on presence (or absence) of physical linkages between colony members.