On Sunday, June 23, I'll be giving a talk on Darwinian Agriculture, as part of the "Evolution Out of Bounds" symposium at the Evolution 2013 meeting, in Snowbird, Utah. These annual evolution meetings are usually really interesting, as I've discussed previously, and other talks in the symposium range from evolution of disease to evolving robots. Those interested in our evolution-of-multicellularity research should look for the talk by Kristin Jacobsen on Sunday afternoon and the poster presentation by Jenn Pentz Monday evening.

Serotonin signaling in the brain of adult female mice is required for sexual preference
"male mutant mice lacking serotonin have lost sexual preference.... female mouse mutants lacking either central serotonergic neurons or serotonin... displayed increased female-female mounting"

Regeneration of Little Ice Age bryophytes emerging from a polar glacier with implications of totipotency in extreme environments "following 400 y of ice entombment... [bryophyte cells can ] dedifferentiate into a meristematic state (analogous to stem cells) and develop a new plant."

Quorum-sensing autoinducers resuscitate dormant Vibrio cholerae in environmental water samples
[I wonder if this would work with other "unculturable" microbes.]

Molecular evolution of peptidergic signaling systems in bilaterians "phylogenetic reconstruction tools... show that a large fraction of human PSs [peptide-based signaling systems] were already present in the last common ancestor of flies, mollusks, urchins, and mammals"

Honey constituents up-regulate detoxification and immunity genes in the western honey bee Apis mellifera "apicultural use of honey substitutes, including high-fructose corn syrup, may thus compromise the ability of honey bees to cope with pesticides and pathogens and contribute to colony losses"

Palaeontological evidence for an Oligocene divergence between Old World monkeys and apes" "the oldest known fossil 'ape', represented by a partial mandible... the oldest stem member of the Old World monkey clade, represented by a lower third molar... recovered from a precisely dated 25.2-Myr-old stratum in... the East African Rift in Tanzania."

Experimental evidence that evolutionarily diverse assemblages result in higher productivity "Species produced more biomass than predicted from their monocultures when they were in plots with distantly related species and produced the amount of biomass predicted from monoculture when sown with close relatives."

No, seriously. I'm open to the hypothesis that a student could learn as much or more in a well-produced MOOC than in a typical large-lecture/computer-graded introductory course. But let's see the data.

Professor Char Weise writes:

"I am also a parent who is going to be paying college tuition for his oldest child in a couple of years. I am being made keenly aware of the cost-quality tradeoff, and I'm seeing a product that sacrifices only a little on the quality end while having major benefits on the cost end. As a parent, I'm intrigued. As a professor at a liberal arts college, I am terrified."

"Another approach would be to outsource the introductory courses in economics and other disciplines [to MOOCs]. We already do this to some extent by accepting credit for our introductory courses for courses taught at high schools or other institutions including community colleges. A student who gets a score of 5 on the AP economics test gets credit for Econ 103 and 104... I can imagine a time when the standard program of higher education involves a student spending a year (maybe less) accumulating a year's worth of college credit for introductory courses by taking MOOCs and then enrolling in Gettysburg's (or a similar institution's) excellent and prestigious three-year bachelors' program."

Also this week:

Nanoscale analysis of pyritized microfossils reveals differential heterotrophic consumption in the ∼1.9-Ga Gunflint chert "Three-dimensional nanotomography reveals additional pyritized biomaterial, including hollow, cellular epibionts and extracellular polymeric substances, showing a preference for attachment to Gunflintia over Huroniospora and interpreted as components of a saprophytic heterotrophic, decomposing community. " 1.9-billion-year-old fossils? Isn't that 1.899994 billion years before the earth was created?

Adaptive dynamics under development-based genotype-phenotype maps"
Evolution: Stuck between the teeth"
"developmental complexity often prevents natural selection from reaching optimal fitness when fitness is directly linked to attaining a particular phenotype, but that these 'adaptive peaks' can be reached when fitness is instead linked to functional properties of the phenotype.

* Record data using a Livescribe pen, in one of their microdot notebooks.
* Put a comma after each entry, including last entry in each line.
* Use MyScript to convert page to text, using Rich Text option.
* Select (highlight) table data, including comma-separated heading.
* Open a blank Libre-Office Calc (spreadsheet) document.
* Edit / Paste Special, using "Unformatted text'' and comma-separated options.
* Edit if needed.
* Save as .CSV file using defaults.

The result can be opened in Excel, if you insist. When I tried pasting the data directly into Excel, values weren't separated properly, but there may be a way to do it.

I have only tested this with Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen.

I got this idea here.

Independent divergence of 13- and 17-y life cycles among three periodical cicada lineages "at any given location, up to three distinct species groups (Decim, Cassini, Decula) with synchronized life cycles are involved... life-cycle synchronization of invading congeners to a dominant resident population enabled escape from predation" [OK, but why not 7 and 11 years?]

Transgene-based, female-specific lethality system for genetic sexing of the silkworm, Bombyx mori

Neo-sex chromosomes and adaptive potential in tortricid pests "fusion between an ancestral Z [sex] chromosome and an autosome corresponding to chromosome 15 in the Bombyx mori reference genome... conferring insecticide resistance and clusters of genes involved in detoxification of plant secondary metabolites under sex-linked inheritance"

This week, however, high school student Ria Chhabra and colleagues published a paper in PLoS One reporting both greater longevity and increased egg-laying at all ages, in fruit flies fed various organic foods. It's not inconceivable that some conventionally-grown produce could be so poor, nutritionally, that it would reduce both lifespan and reproduction. But their data seem inconsistent with our hypothesis that organic-vs-conventional differences were mainly differences in toxins (synthetic in conventional, natural in organic) and that natural toxins mainly acted as environmental cues, switching physiology towards longevity at the expense of reproduction.

I'd like to see this experiment repeated by a different lab, however, before drawing firm conclusions. There are a couple of strange things in their data. First, as noted in the paper, survival curves for Drosophila are usually sigmoidal, whereas theirs are more linear. Also, their peak egg-laying rate was reportedly at an age of 1 day. Other studies I've seen show essentially no egg-laying that early, with peaks at day 5 or so. See this paper or this open-access one.

Stable isotope evidence of meat eating and hunting specialization in adult male chimpanzees "sex differences in food acquisition and consumption may have persisted throughout hominin evolution, rather than being a recent development"

New World cattle show ancestry from multiple independent domestication events "pre-Columbian introgression of genes from African cattle into southern Europe"

Key role for a glutathione transferase in multiple-herbicide resistance in grass weeds "When the black-grass A. myosuroides (Am) AmGSTF1 was expressed in Arabidopsis thaliana, the transgenic plants acquired resistance to multiple herbicides"

Potential shortfall of pyramided transgenic cotton for insect resistance management "results from 21 selection experiments with eight species of lepidopteran pests indicates that some cross-resistance typically occurs between Cry1A and Cry2A toxins."

The Upper Limb of Australopithecus sediba "use of the forelimb primarily for prehension and manipulation appears to arise later, likely with the emergence of Homo erectus" [There are several articles on A. sediba in this issue.]

Achieving the triple bottom line in the face of inherent trade-offs among social equity, economic return, and conservation "three very different case studies in California (United States), Raja Ampat (Indonesia), and the wider Coral Triangle region (Southeast Asia). We show that equity tends to trade off nonlinearly with the potential to achieve conservation objectives, such that similar conservation outcomes can be possible with greater equity, to a point."

Decreased water flowing from a forest amended with calcium silicate "An unexpected outcome of the Ca amendment was a change in watershed hydrology; annual evapotranspiration increased by 25%, 18%, and 19%, respectively, for the 3 y following treatment before returning to pretreatment levels. "

Responses of Mn2+ speciation in Deinococcus radiodurans and Escherichia coli to γ-radiation by advanced paramagnetic resonance "extreme radiation resistance of D. radiodurans cells cannot be attributed to SodA"

Real scientists publish in journals with scientific-sounding names, but publication in a scientific-sounding journal is no guarantee that the conclusions are correct or that the author is a real expert.

For example, in 2009 I discussed a paper showing that food deprivation extends lifespan of C. elegans nematode worms by delaying their reproduction. I've seen other papers claiming to extend lifespan without reducing reproduction, but those papers have ignored possible effects on timing of reproduction. In a growing population, reproducing later reduces fitness, because your offspring are added to a larger gene pool. On the other hand, if the population is decreasing...

But a recent paper in PNAS reports that chemicals called ascorides (thought to be used as a crowding cue) increase the lifespan of C. elegans, without an apparent reproductive cost. Treated animals produced at least as many offspring as controls, at all ages. I don't understand this result. If there's no tradeoff, why haven't they evolved to turn on this response all the time, even without the crowding cue?

In humans, though, "Exceptional longevity is associated with decreased reproduction." That was the conclusion of a 2011 paper. They found that Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians (average age ~100 years) averaged 2.0 children, while a control group (parents of their children's spouses and friends, who died in their 70's) averaged 2.5 children. The centenarians also reproduced later in life (28-32 vs. 26-30). So, is it worth having 0.5 fewer children, to live 30 more years? Natural selection apparently doesn't think so.

Here are some interesting papers published this week.

Multiple Instances of Ancient Balancing Selection Shared Between Humans and Chimpanzees " In addition to the major histocompatibility complex, we identified 125 regions in which the same haplotypes are segregating in the two species [neither version has displaced the other in either species in 6 million years], all but two of which are noncoding [i.e., they probably control other genes rather than coding for a protein]." The most likely explanation for such prolonged co-existence is that individuals with less-common alleles may be resistant to pathogens that have evolved to attack those with more-common alleles.

Accelerated gene evolution through replication-transcription conflicts" "We propose that bacteria, and potentially other organisms, promote faster evolution of specific genes through orientation-dependent encounters between DNA replication and transcription."

Palaeontology: Tubular worms from the Burgess Shale"

Preservation of ovarian follicles reveals early evolution of avian reproductive behaviour"

Both information and social cohesion determine collective decisions in animal groups

Governance regime and location influence avoided deforestation success of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon

Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance