Old Weblog - January 2003

Two groups of US biologists say that climate change is affecting living systems, as climatologists have predicted: many species are forsaking their ranges to find cooler or higher habitats.
Organisms don't always need to evolve to combat changing climatic conditions; sometimes they simply move.
Decades of orang-utan watching has led scientists to believe that some of the animals have developed their own culture.
Scientists used to study cultures in Petri dishes; now they study them in ape colonies.
It seems unlikely that lobster cages might ever vie with pigeon coops as the object of long-range racers' obsessions. Yet scientists have discovered that the edible crustacean has homing instincts comparable with those of its avian counterpart.
A hugely ambitious project to find and name every species on Earth within the next 25 years has been launched by scientists. The internet and the development of DNA sequencing technology make the goal achievable, they say.
The remains of seven individuals have been found at Dmanisi - the most recent this summer - but what made this discovery so special was that it did not look like the skull of any human ever found outside Africa before.
Long-winded journalism at its worst.
Dangerously high numbers of one of the world's rarest and most spectacular birds have died from disease in the last month. An outbreak of avian botulism has killed 7% of the world population of 969 birds in one month.
Natural Selection on overdrive.
Four-winged dinosaur makes feathers fly (New Scientist: 03-Jan-03)
A stunning set of six fossils discovered in China could rewrite our understanding of how and why birds first took to the sky. The fossils clearly show a small dinosaur that had flight feathers covering its legs, as well as tail and arms, forming an extra pair of wings never before seen by palaeontologists.
Stick insect forces evolutionary rethink (New Scientist: 03-Jan-03)
The lowly stick insect has forced a rethink of one of the key rules of evolution - that complex anatomical features do not disappear and reappear over the course of time. Researchers have discovered that on a number of occasions in the past 300 million years, stick insects have lost their wings, then re-evolved them. Entomologists have described the revelation as "revolutionary".
Edible bananas may disappear within a decade if urgent action is not taken to develop new varieties resistant to blight. The problem is that the banana we eat is a seedless, sterile article which could slip the way of its predecessor which was wiped out by blight half a century ago.
That enduring metaphor for the randomness of evolution, a blind watchmaker that works to no pattern or design, is being challenged by two European chemists. They say that the watchmaker may have been blind, but was guided and constrained by the changing chemistry of the environment, with many inevitable results.
An action can be both random and constrained: a standard dice is random, but it is constrained to integers between 1 and 6... It will never roll a 3½. Evolution is constrained by both physical laws and history.
The fossil of an early human-like creature (hominid) from southern Africa is raising fresh questions about our origins. Remains from the Sterkfontein Caves near Johannesburg suggest our ancestors were less chimp-like than we thought.
Other experts are unimpressed.