October 2012
Zombies and the problem of consciousness
Seeing as it’s Halloween, I'm going to play devil’s advocate with the help of some zombies and explore the Gordian knot of consciousness. I think most scientists would hold a physicalist view when it comes to their view of how the world ‘really’ is. That is to say, objectively speaking, all there is to the universe are […]
Dinosaur detective stories
“Being a paleontologist is like being a coroner except all the witnesses are dead and all the evidence has been left out in the rain for 65 million years” Mike Brett-Surman, 1994 I am very much for palaeontology and the enthusiasm for the science today but there was a time when even the mighty dinosaurs were […]
Sulawesi field report
July and August of this year saw members of the Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecology research group embark on another field season studying the birds of tropical south-east Sulawesi, Indonesia. Principal investigators Dr. Nicola Marples and Dr. Dave Kelly were joined this year by PhD student Seán Kelly, as well as a number of undergraduates from […]
The not so black and white story of why the zebra got its stripes
Why are zebra black and white? I would hazard a guess your answer is camouflage, and you would be right… well, mostly. I would then bet you got the beast from which the zebra is hiding wrong. While the black and white stripes might disrupt outline of a zebra in the eyes of an ambushing lion […]
All the better to see you with
A recent discovery of a large eye found by a beachcomber in Florida initiated a flurry of internet speculation of its mysterious owner. The contenders for ownership included colossal squid, thresher sharks and a range of mysterious sea creatures both real and imagined. While the owner of the tennis ball sized eye has recently been attributed to a swordfish, it […]
The tree on the web
Visualising the tree of life is a challenge for even the most artistically attuned in the scientific community. The problem is the sheer number of species that we need to represent, literally millions. But I think the latest attempt meets the challenge. The developers of OneZoom, the name of the new approach, argue that we […]
Hotbeds of photosynthesis evolution
Grasses rank among the world’s most ecologically and economically important plants including wheat, barley, rice and maize. Evolution of the C4 syndrome has made photosynthesis highly efficient in about half of their species, inspiring intensive efforts to engineer the pathway into C3 crops to improve drought and heat tolerance. An international collaboration called the Grass Phylogeny Working Group (including Trevor Hodkinson, […]
What did what to what? Finding causality in chaos.
A new paper has been published in Science by George Sugihara and colleagues, which is an immediate contender for the most insightful paper I’ve ever read. In the paper they outline a new method, which they dub ‘Convergent Cross Mapping’ (CCM), for detecting causality between variables using time series data. Not only does CCM allow […]
Darwin’s insects, Dodo skeletons and macaques with braces
The Natural History museum in Dublin is one of my favourite places in the city. It has a very Victorian feel to it, none of this pandering to the X-box generation, just cabinet upon cabinet of mounted skins and skeletons revealing the diversity of nature. Some of the taxidermy is pretty hilarious and you can see the […]
“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect”
I spoke before of how to use mathematics to convey an idea in biology. Here, I’ll take a different tack and discuss a paper in which the author makes his argument with naked English. The author in question is Nicholas Humphrey who in his famous paper ‘The social function of the intellect’ draws a wonderful […]