This is both a history of evolution and a biography of Darwin. It discusses the impact of his work on Western Civilization. Scientific developments that were influenced by Darwinian thought include:

• Konrad Lorenz on ethology (animal behaviour and its origins),
• Margaret Mead on evolution,
• Jane Goodall on primate research,
• Edward O. Wilson on sociobiology,
• Richard Leakey on paleontology, and
• Nicholas Wade on recombinant DNA research

This book has exerpts from the writings of pre-Darwinian scientists such as Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell; exerpts from the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man; various debates showing how Darwin influenced science, philosophy, theology, society, and literature. There’s an epilogue by the editor, Philip Appleman.

It’s in my To Be Read pile.

Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edition, 1970.
370 pages plus index.

A Replicated Typo has a long article about the origin of our minds.

Charles Darwin… proposed that there is “no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”

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The notion that we can identify a sequence of adaptations accounting for the evolution of minds in animals stems from research into social cognition, particularly surrounding Premack & Woodruff’s (1978) concept of a Theory of Mind.

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Even though there are differing degrees of behavioural complexity across various animal domains, can a sequence of adaptations be established?

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Highly relevant to social behaviour influencing brain gene expression is a gene known as egr1….

Our brains are affected by genes, but our surroundings and experiences influence how our brains develop. This summary and exploration is a fascinating peek into a complex problem.

Nick Matzke rounds up the arguments and evidence, beginning with Darwin’s work, that explains how complex systems needing multiple parts can evolve:

The standard answer to this question was put forward by Darwin. Mivart (1871) argued that the “incipient stages of useful structures” could not have evolved gradually by variation and natural selection, because the intermediate stages of complex systems would have been nonfunctional. Darwin replied in the 6th edition of Origin of Species (Darwin, 1872) by emphasizing the importance of change of function in evolution. Although Darwin’s most famous discussion of the evolution of a complex system, the eye, was an example of massive improvement of function from a rudimentary ancestor (Salvini-Plawen and Mayr, 1977; Nilsson and Pelger, 1994), Darwin gave equal weight to examples of functional shift in evolution. These included the complex reproductive devices of orchids and barnacles, groups with which he was particularly familiar (Darwin, 1851, 1854, 1862). Intricate multi-component systems such as these could not have originated by gradual improvement of a single function, but if systems and components underwent functional shift, then selection could have preserved intermediates for a function different from the final one. The equal importance of improvement of function and change of function for understanding the evolutionary origin of novel complex systems has been similarly emphasized by later workers (Maynard Smith, 1975; Mayr, 1976). Recent studies give cooption of structures a key role in the origin of feathers (Prum and Brush, 2002), and novel organs (Pellmyr and Krenn, 2002); Mayr (1976) gives many other examples. Computer simulations also show the importance of cooption for the origin of complex systems with multiple required parts (Lenski et al., 2003).

Do these common insights from classical, organismal evolutionary biology help us to understand the solution to the puzzle Macnab put forward regarding the origin of flagellum? Cooption at the molecular level is in fact as well-documented at it is at the macroscopic level (Ganfornina and Sanchez, 1999; Thornhill and Ussery, 2000; True and Carroll, 2002). It has been implicated in origin of ancient multi-component molecular systems such as the Krebs cycle (Melendez-Hevia et al., 1996) as well as the rapid origin of multi-component catabolic pathways for abiotic toxins that humans have recently introduced into the environment, such as pentachlorophenol (Anandarajah et al., 2000; Copley, 2000), atrazine (de Souza et al., 1998; Sadowsky et al., 1998; Seffernick and Wackett, 2001), and 2,4-dinitrotoluene (Johnson et al., 2002); many other cases of catabolic pathway evolution exist (Mortlock, 1992). All of these systems absolutely require multiple protein species for proper function. Even for some molecular systems equaling the flagellum in complexity, reasonably detailed reconstructions of evolutionary origins exist. Generally these are available for systems which originated relatively recently in geological history, which are well-studied due to medical importance, and where phylogeny is relatively well resolved; examples include the vertebrate blood-clotting cascade (Doolittle and Feng, 1987; Hanumanthaiah et al., 2002; Jiang and Doolittle, 2003) and the vertebrate immune system (Muller et al., 1999; Pasquier and Litman, 2000).

Andrew Sullivan asks, “Did the Bible’s editors conceal evidence of Israelite polytheism?” And the answer is, “Of course they did.” Nothing travels down the centuries without being re-interpreted to meet the needs of the day.

Tonight’s Biblical Conundrum points straight to a nice little article by Robert Wright about the occurrence of both El and Yhwh.

Here’s a passage from Deuteronomy 32:

When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.

For the Lord’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.

It’s likely that “Most High”—Elyon—refers to El, god of the Canaanites:

The two words appear together—El Elyon—more than two dozen times in the Bible.

So where did the confusing phrase “children of Israel” come from? It sounds as if God is taking a census.

The King James edition got this phrase from the “Masoretic Text,” a Hebrew edition of the Bible that took shape in the early Middle Ages, more than a millennium after Deuteronomy was written. Where the Masoretic Text—the earliest extant Hebrew Bible—got it is a mystery.

We now have two much older versions of Deuteronomy, and neither contains the phrase “Children of Israel.” Here’s the story:

Some scholars who have used the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint to reconstruct the authentic version of the verse say that “children of Israel” was stuck in as a replacement for “sons of El.” With that lost phrase restored, a verse that was cryptic suddenly makes sense: El—the most high god, Elyon—divided the world’s people into ethnic groups and gave one group to each of his sons. And Yahweh, one of those sons, was given the people of Jacob. Apparently at this point in Israelite history (and there’s no telling how long ago this story originated) Yahweh isn’t God, but just a god—and a son of God, one among many.

Elephants, even now, love water. And they come by it honestly. In the Eocene period, 37 million years ago, the ancestors of elephants spent time in the water probing with their proto-trunks for aquatic plants to eat. It’s possible that the elephant’s trunk developed initially for reaching deep into the water for forage.

Moeritherium (Luci Betti-Nash/Stony Brook University)

Two early proboscideans, Moeritherium andBarytherium, have left fragmentary remains. To tell what they ate, researchers looked at the distribution of isotopes in their teeth. The isotopes reflect a watery environment.

While carbon isotopes can give clues as to an animal’s diet, oxygen isotopes found in teeth come from local water sources – and variations in the ratios of these isotopes can indicate the type of environment the animal lived in. They compared the ratios of these isotopes to definitely terrestrial animals from the same period and these results – when combined with results from studies of embryology, molecular data, and sedimentology – lead them to believe that Moeritherium was semi-aquatic.

We already know that their closest relatives are the sirenians, or manatees and dugongs, which are fully aquatic. Researchers hope to look at other ancestors of elephants to find when they split off from sirenians and when they started feeding on land.