Just a reminder, the abstract deadline for the 19th International Conference on the Cell and Molecular Biology of Chlamydomonas (Chlamy 2020) is March 15.
Fierce Roller
Evolution, transitions, and volvocine algae
Just a reminder, the abstract deadline for the 19th International Conference on the Cell and Molecular Biology of Chlamydomonas (Chlamy 2020) is March 15.
If you’re planning to go to the Fifth International Volvox Conference, it’s time to get a move on. Early bird registration and, more importantly, abstract submission end Saturday. Registration is open (at a slightly higher rate) until July 13, but if you want to present a poster or talk, the June 1 deadline applies.
The meeting is July 26-28 in Tokyo and includes a July 29 excursion to the NIES microbial culture collection and the National Museum of Nature and Science.
Figure 1B from Baym et al. 2016. Experimental evolution of antibiotic resistance in E. coli bacteria. Bacteria were inoculated at both ends of the plate and evolved to tolerate the initially deadly concentration of antibiotic in the middle.
It’s possible for something to be both true and misleading. Here’s a great example. Frank Sherwin, a Research Associate at the Institute for Creation Research, recently wrote,
Evolutionists list antibiotic resistance as evidence of evolution, but in reality it has nothing to do with the origin of antibiotic resistance genes—let alone novel bacterial species.
Each of those things is true, but the sentence still manages to be misleading. Evolutionary biologists do regard antibiotic resistance as evidence of evolution. Real-time observations of the evolution of antibiotic resistance, like those in Michael Baym’s experiment, demonstrate evolution in action. Those experiments do have nothing to do with the origin of novel genes or of speciation. I’ve just admitted that both parts of the sentence are true, so what’s the problem?
It’s the but.
Today is the last day to enter the drawing for a ready-to-hang print of Volvox aureus on canvas. There’s no catch; all you have to do is go to freethoughtblogs.com/fierceroller/?p=5256 and leave a comment with your favorite species (of anything). That’s it!
Right now there are only a dozen entries, so your odds of winning are pretty good. The winner will be announced on Monday.
Volvox aureus by me
Another off-label use of the name “Volvox” has started showing up in my Twitter alerts: Revolog Volvox Film.
Image from https://shop.revolog.net/product/volvox.
Image from www.twoheadedquarter.net.
Yesterday, I ran a bit long about Elizabeth Pennisi’s new article in Science, “The momentous transition to multicellular life may not have been so hard after all.” I’m not the only one who noticed it, though; Uncommon Descent also commented (“At Science: Maybe the transition from single cells to multicellular life wasn’t that hard?“). There’s not much to it, just a longish quote from the article followed by this:
So at the basic level, there is a program that adapts single cells to multicellularity? Yes, that certainly makes multicellularity easier and even swifter but it also make traditional Darwinian explanations sound ever more stretched.
So if the evolution of multicellularity is easy, that’s evidence against “traditional Darwinian explanations.” Remember “Heads I win, tails you lose“?
…if multicellularity is really complicated, that’s evidence for intelligent design. But if multicellularity is really simple, that’s evidence for intelligent design.
Figure 3 A&B from Balasubramanian 2018. (a) V. barberi flock where 56 colonies gathered over several minutes and rotated coherently and rapidly in the culture well. (b) Schematic of flock in panel a.
At the Fourth International Volvox Meeting in St. Louis, a student from Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania presented a talk and a poster on “flocking” behavior in Volvox barberi. Now a preprint describing his work is available on bioRxiv.
From an advertising email for World Market:
You got the rights to put the Game of Thrones logo on wine, and the most creative thing you could come up with was “Game of Thrones Red Wine”?
Jeremy Pickett-Heaps from the University of Melbourne shared this nice video of Volvox carteri development:
Phycologia Volume 56, Issue 4 cover showing Pleodorina sphaerica. Photograph by Hisayoshi Nozaki.