On science blogs: Relations

FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH, THE HORSE'S TOE. Ancient DNA extracted from fossils has become a stunningly excellent tool for studying evolution, and it gets more ancient every day.

Two pieces of the horse metapodial bone (~700K BP), before DNA extraction. Credit: Ludovic Orlando

Until this week the oldest DNA studied, dated to the Upper Pleistocene about 80,000 years ago, came from an ancient human group, the mysterious Denisovans. That record has just been smashed, and then some, by a middle Pleistocene horse from the Canadian permafrost, who died between 560,000 and 780,000 years ago.

Kate Wong's long post at SciAm's Observations explains what the find tells us about horse evolution, recaps the history of ancient DNA studies, and looks hopefully to the future, especially potential studies of DNA from more very old fossils in the human line. Wong is dreaming audaciously of studying DNA from Australopithecus sediba, our possible ancestor from 2 million years ago. As she points out, the technical hurdle is DNA preservation. The horse was recovered from permafrost: very cold, very dry, the best possible venue for preserving DNA. A. sediba fossils come from a dry site too.

By contrast, so far as I know scientists still have not recovered DNA from the hobbit, Homo floresiensis, whose fossils are young, dated at only about 17,000 years ago. That's probably because the hobbit lived on the Indonesian island of Flores, where the worst possible conditions for DNA preservation prevail: hot and wet.

Hobbit DNA could settle the persistent question of where the hobbit belongs in the human taxonomic scheme. Island dwarfing of Homo sap? Microcephalic modern human? Teeny-tiny descendant of big-brained, hulking Homo erectus?

Heaven help us, it was even suggested that the hobbit might be a remnant of seafaring Australopithecus, come all the way from Africa 2 to 4 million years ago. A truly Ancient Mariner. But of course a DNA verdict would have deprived us of several years of the nasty wrangling that helps make paleontology such a treat to write about.

SPEAKING OF OUR CLOSE RELATIVES. The National Institutes of Health has made its long-expected announcement that it is setting its research chimpanzees free. Most of them, anyway. Several NIH-sponsored research projects involving our closest relatives will be phased out, and 310 of the chimps that have done time as subjects of invasive research without the benefit of informed consent will (probably not) receive thanks for their self-sacrifice and be sent to the chimp version of retirement communities. Fifty are to be held in reserve for research projects, if any, where only chimpanzees will do, for example research on emerging diseases. This last decision will be revisited in 5 years. Jocelyn Kaiser reports at ScienceInsider.

Credit: Bragi Thor/Flickr

Carrying out this plan is complex and will take a few years, according to Geoff Brumfiel at NPR's Shots. At Wired Science, Brandon Keim points out that expanding the federal chimp sanctuaries will require Congress to come up with more money. Uh-oh.

One especially intriguing wrinkle is that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to designate captive chimps as an endangered species, just like the wild ones. According to Keim, declaring captive chimps endangered would also have a big impact on privately funded chimp research.

If captive chimps are also considered endangered, invasive research will be even harder to conduct, especially by private companies. Approximately 500 chimpanzees are owned by pharmaceutical companies and private research centers. Compared to the NIH, that research is shrouded in secrecy.

To view a very different sort of chimp research, field notes on wild chimpanzees, see a guest post at SciAm's Expeditions blog by grad student Maureen McCarthy. She and her colleagues have been studying an unusual group of Ugandan chimps that seem to hunt more often than other chimp bands. Their prey are colobus monkeys.

We took a closer look and found the lone female sitting calmly and eating a young black-and-white colobus monkey … We watched in utter fascination for thirty minutes or more as she slowly consumed the carcass, taking intermittent bites of leaves between bits of meat. This “steak with salad” style of meat consumption is a commonly observed dining practice among chimpanzees, and may aid in the processing of raw meat. As we watched her eat, we wondered how she came to have this prized catch. Hunting is usually a group activity and a male-dominated affair among chimpanzees …

THE RISE OF SCIENCE BLOG NETWORKS. I haven't seen blogging yet from or about the meeting of the World Conference of Science Journalists, just concluded in Helsinki. But they seem to be archiving webcasts of the plenary sessions. One topic of particular relevance here is a session on the rise of the science blog network. It stars the Guardian's Alok Jha; Betsy Mason, science editor for Wired.com; and Ed Yong, who recently took Not Exactly Rocket Science to Phenomena, the National Geographic's new, small, choice network. Not to mention SciAm's Bora Zivkovic, and everybody knows who Bora is.

HAS THE CLIMATE SHIFTED ON CLIMATE CHANGE? ARE POLITICAL ATTACKS ON CLIMATE SCIENCE OVER? It was said that other news swamped President Obama's Tuesday declaration that he was moving ahead with efforts to mitigate climate change via administrative and regulatory steps. And there was indeed much other news, not to mention non-news, ranging from the Supreme Court's pronouncements on gay marriage (YAY!) and the Voting Rights Act (BOO!) to the entirely-beside-the-point guessing game of Where-Is-Edward-Snowden. But there were loads of posts about the implications (or not) of the climate speech too, so many that I can mention only a few.

Which makes roundups valuable. So check out Charlie Petit's post at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, which links to lots of commentary on what Obama said and what it (maybe) means. Charlie singles out for particular praise a group of stories from Environment & Energy Publishing, a private service that makes its material available free for a few days. The package, Charlie says, is a tutorial. I am reading it as soon as I finish this.

Dot Earth's Andrew Revkin also links to (and quotes from) outside commentary. So does David Biello at SciAm's Observations, but he also supplies a relatively compact analysis of specific proposals in the speech. Some reality checking as well.

At Technology Review, Kevin Bullis considers what the new climate policy will mean for technology development and concludes that the answer is not much without new R&D funding. Funding being Congress's department, I guess we shouldn't hold our collective breath. Kathiann M. Kowalski points out at Summa Cum Latte that the Obama program will take a long time to execute, also noting that it emphasizes adapting to inevitable climate change as well as mitigation.

AND NOW FOR THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE. At Climate Progress, Joe Romm rhapsodized, interpreting Obama's message thusly: "In short, become climate hawks, become single issue voters on the issue. Invest in clean energy, divest from dirty energy." Anthony Watts's Watts Up With That offered house room to Steve Goreham, reprinting his Washington Times op-ed attack on "climatism," defined as "the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate." He attacks it, but does little to refute it.

That stance confirms the analysis from Jennifer A. Dlouhy at FuelFix. She says the Republicans are pivoting away from attacks on climate science. Instead,

Republicans are taking aim at the plan’s economic costs — not the science underpinning it. It’s a remarkable change for a political party with high-profile leaders who have declared climate change a hoax and held congressional hearings designed to amplify doubts about whether human behavior contributes to the phenomenon. It also may be a pragmatic one. As attitudes and beliefs about climate change have shifted — and the nation’s economic woes have come to the forefront — casting Obama’s plan as a job killer and “backdoor energy tax” may be a better strategy. Those were the overwhelming messages from Republican lawmakers criticizing Obama’s climate change plan …

So maybe climate science denialism is just about over? Leaving science writers much less to write about? Have we actually made a difference? Have we written ourselves out of work? Now there's irony for you. Are the Republicans right? Do you suppose growing acceptance of climate change science will turn out, in our case, to be a job-killer after all?

HOLIDAY NEXT WEEK. Things are likely to be slow next week, and many will take Friday off to recover from Thursday's Independence Day merrymaking. So I will too. Back here Friday, July 12. Thank you, George III. Isn't it great to be an American?

June 28, 2013

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