Vote Darwin —

The Georgia congressman who called evolution "lies straight from the pit of hell" won reelection Tuesday in an uncontested race. But 4000 of his constituents managed to find a write-in candidate they could believe in — the father of evolution, who has been dead for 130 years. (Via Jennifer Ouellette) — Maggie •

Creature Cast is one of my favorite blogs — a series of charmingly animated videos about surprising, oft-overlooked details in the animal kingdom. Better yet, the videos are often made by students who work with professor Casey Dunn's evolution and diversity laboratory at Brown University.

In this entry, Riley Thompson, from the College of the Atlantic, explains how transparency — the biological kind — really works. Why can we see through some animals and not others?

See more videos at Creature Cast

Tracy King sends us an "animated history of genetics from Nature to celebrate the release of ENCODE. Narrated by Tim Minchin and animated by the team who made Storm. Written by Adam Rutherford (Nature), Andrew Ellard (Red Dwarf, IT Crowd) and Tracy King (TAM London).

Ever since a monk called Mendel started breeding pea plants we've been learning about our genomes. In 1953, Watson, Crick and Franklin described the structure of the molecule that makes up our genomes: the DNA double helix. Then, in 2001, scientists wrote down the entire 3-billion letter code contained in the average human genome. Now they're trying to interpret that code; to work out how it's used to make different types of cells and different people. The ENCODE project, as it's called, is the latest chapter in the story of you.

The Story of You: ENCODE and the human genome (Thanks, Tracy!)

Bird and Moon comics offers this helpful illustration of how evolution screwed over the parakeet.

See the full comic, "Evolution Sucks"

Via David Ng

Today, we're the only living member of the genus Homo and the only living member of the subtribe Hominina. Along with chimpanzees and bonobos, we're all that remains of the tribe Hominini.

But the fossil record tells us that wasn't always the case. There were, for instance, at least eight other species of Homo running around this planet at one time. So what happened to them? What makes us so special that we're still here? And isn't it just a little weird and meta to be fretting about this? I mean, do lions and tigers spend a lot of time pondering the fate of the Smilodon?

Today, starting at 12:00 Eastern, you can watch as a panel of scientists tackle these and other questions. "Why We Prevailed" is part of the World Science Festival and features anthropologist Alison Brooks, genome biologist Ed Green, paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer (one of the key researchers behind the "Out of Africa" theory), and renowned evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson.

You can also join in a live conversation about the panel, which I'll be hosting. Just post to Twitter with hashtag #prevail, or join us at UStream.

Support Tom the Dancing Bug and receive untold BENEFITS and PRIVILEGES by joining the brand new INNER HIVE right now! “$9.99 every six months to support one of my all-time favorite comics. Boom, done.” -John Gruber, Daring Fireball, INNER HIVE member since four weeks ago

Read the rest

Please insert your Sir Mix-a-Lot joke here —

Humans' have exceptionally rounded rear ends compared to our primate relatives. Turns out, that beefed-up gluteus maximus helps stabilize our upper body when we run, keeping us from falling forward. Read more about the biology and theoretical evolution of running at the Harvard Gazette. (Via Nicholas Thompson) — Maggie •

IO9's Cyriaque Lamar has dug through the Tulane University Louisiana Research Collection of Mardi Gras costume and float designs and uncovered an utterly bizarre float entered in 1873 by the Mistick Krewe of Comus, who set out to lampoon both Charles Darwin and the Reconstruction. They dressed up as their idea of the "missing link" with heavy racist overtones. They didn't make it through the parade -- the police shut them down at Canal Street.

In 1873, Mardi Gras revelers from the Mistick Krewe of Comus — unversed in this newfangled evolutionary theory and angry at the Northern interlopers — dressed up as the "missing links" between animals, plants, and humans. Therefore, you had frightening human-grape and human-corn hybrids running around and fauna baring the faces of Ulysses S. Grant, other hated politicians, and Darwin himself.

You can see these costumes here, but this being 1870s Louisiana, the masquerade was absurdly racist.

Lamar's post details other floats and costumes, including an 1884 version of the Aeneid, an 1888 Middle Ages mythos float, an 1892 tribute to fruits and vegetables, an 1895 Asgard, a 1900 Alice in Wonderland, and a 1925 Japanese mythology set.

In the 1870s, Charles Darwin was the theme of a downright deranged Mardi Gras parade

Whatever its faults, the seed company Monsanto does employ some very smart people, who have a keen understanding of plant genetics. Given that, I've long wondered why the company has been so blindsided by the fairly basic idea that weeds evolve. Did anyone really expect that, when faced with a pressure that threatened their existence, the weeds wouldn't adapt and become resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide?

Apparently, that's exactly what they expected, according to a story on NPR's website.

Daniel Charles interviewed several people who were employed by Monsanto at the time the company released Roundup-tolerant soybeans back in 1996. He found a single, coherent cause of this very strange oversight. Shorter version: Monsanto got so blinded by past performance and its own personal experience that, as an institution, it started to assume nothing would ever change.

First, the company had been selling Roundup for years without any problems. Second, and perhaps most important, the company's scientists had just spent more than a decade, and many millions of dollars, trying to create the Roundup-resistant plants that they desperately wanted — soybeans and cotton and corn. It had been incredibly difficult. When I interviewed former Monsanto scientists for my book on biotech crops, one of them called it the company's "Manhattan Project."

Personally, I find that first assumption particularly egregious. Weeds do best at building resistance to herbicides when the same herbicide is being liberally applied to the same land year after year after year. In order to assume that this behavior wouldn't be the outcome of combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, Monsanto would almost have to assume that those products wouldn't be terribly effective. After all, if you expect that combination to work (and work well) why would you then expect farmers to bother with using herbicide sparingly, or varying the type of herbicide they used?

Read the rest of Daniel Charles' story.

There's some really interesting—and rather disturbing—research coming out of the UK on the nature of cancer cells and why advanced-stage cancers are so difficult to treat.

Scientists have long known that the same type of cancer can play out in very different ways, from a genetic perspective, in one patient compared to another. But this new research shows that, even within the same patient—even within the same tumor—different samples of cancer cells have more genetic differences than they have similarities.

That's a very big deal. It means that cancer cells aren't just cells that grow uncontrollably. They also mutate. Which means that they evolve. That fact has serious implications for cancer treatment. Just like bacteria can evolve to become resistant to antibiotics, cancer cells can evolve resistance to the treatments we throw at them. At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong explains how this discovery fits into the bigger picture of why curing cancer is so damned difficult:

For a start, cancer isn’t a single disease, so we can dispense with the idea of a single “cure”. There are over 200 different types, each with their own individual quirks. Even for a single type – say, breast cancer – there can be many different sub-types that demand different treatments. Even within a single subtype, one patient’s tumour can be very different from another’s. They could both have very different sets of mutated genes, which can affect their prognosis and which drugs they should take.

And now we know that's true within a tumor, as well. At the Cancer Research UK blog (where Ed used to work), Henry Scowcroft has a nice summary of how this one discovery explains three perplexing problems we've long had with cancer cells:

Firstly, cancer is very difficult to cure after it has spread. This is despite years of progress in chemotherapy and radiotherapy, two techniques that can offer respite to people with advanced cancer.

Secondly, most advanced cancers eventually become resistant to every type of drug used to treat them – both ‘traditional’ chemo and these newer agents. This is quite extraordinary: tumours can work out how to cope with chemicals that they’ve never ‘seen’ before – a biological superpower far beyond that of infectious diseases. Just consider how it’s taken ‘multidrug resistant’ bacteria like MRSA decades to evolve. Yet cancers can do this in a matter of months or even weeks. How?

And finally, researchers haven’t yet managed to develop tests to predict how a patient’s disease will progress, nor monitor their progress (a field called ‘biomarker’ research) – this is despite years of research, and a lot of tantalising pilot studies. Sometimes researchers detect a promising ‘signal’ by looking at samples from a handful of patients, only for this to disappear in larger numbers of people.

Read Ed Yong's full story on this research.

Read Henry Snowcroft's full story on this research.