I am currently reading the book The Best American Science Writing 2007, and in it was an article about lie detecting by Robin Marantz Henig entitled Looking for the lie that was published in the New York Times Magazine. (Just so you know, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that polygraphs can detect lies at very high accuracy.)

Towards the end of her piece, Henig discusses some of the evolutionary implications pertaining to deception and the development of the brain. Advanced social interactions are complex and often deception needs to be part of the equation and might be somewhat related to skills that make individuals socially adapted and intelligent.

This idea is interesting because it would explain a lot of the selfish behavior that we see in humans today. Social groups that are small enough may not suffer as much from serious deceptive offences, though they definitely have their share of gossiping, etc.

But as social groups get bigger, relationships are not as much defined by kinship but by association and profession. Being able to lie or deceive may have become adaptive in these settings where it would be the difference between gaining an advantage over a competitor or getting the short end of the stick.

Henig explores the possibility that having a proven lie detector technology may not be desirable to continue living comfortably as society functions now. She discusses the spectrum of lies from harmless to malicious and how lying is not all bad. This reminded me of an episode of the manga and anime series “Kino’s Journey,” where Kino comes to a country where all the people live alone in their own houses because years ago they acquired the ability to read other peoples thoughts. It is an interesting and spot-on portrayal of how humans could ruin things if all thoughts were revealed.

The research going into lie detection is quite fascinating, as are the ethical and moral implications behind it. One researcher has nailed down a system of recognizing facial and vocal cues to tell when people are lying that is 95% accurate. He does, however, have a rule that he doesn’t use his ability to out his family and friends when they are lying to him. I wonder if I would be able to restrain myself if I had the same capabilities!


Image credit:
Flickr user Elia Diodati

There is an interesting NYTimes article about a researcher who studies about fireflies.

Different species of fireflies have different patterns of flashing, but only the males flash while flying! The females usually sit in the grass observing the males, often looking for a male of their own species to respond to. Often you can find several different species of fireflies in the same field. This researcher studies the flashing of the fireflies and what the different patterns might mean.

The article goes on to discuss evolution and traits that might be under selection, such as the aforementioned flashing patterns. Over evolutionary time, some traits may become more frequent in a population and eventually could become commonly expressed in the population. If one male is better at attracting females, then his traits will get passed down to more offspring than the next male. The frequency of his traits in the population increases, and you can imagine how after many many generations the frequency of alleles in the population might change in one direction or any other depending on the conditions of the environment.

The rest of the article is a profile on the researcher, if you are interested in reading the person’s story.

Hope everyone’s summer is awesome so far!

Image credit: Flickr user Coso Blues

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE): Peer-reviewed video journal articles

Remember that Large Hadron Rap that blew up on YouTube? A fellow classmate in my writing about science course wrote about “viral” videos like that one for his term paper. It’s a really cool idea, since he took the angle that education about science could benefit from more videos like these.

From another angle, scientists could educate other scientists through video as well.

The Journal of Visualized Experiments is unique in that all of their publications are in video format. There is an accompanying text article, but the video is the centerpiece. Many of the articles are about techniques in labs and procedures, but I would be interested to see what else can be done in this style.

From reading the “About JoVE” page, JoVE is all about “rapid knowledge transfer,” “addressing complexity,” “lifting the laboratory time sink,” “integrating time,” and “a new movement in science publishing.”


One thing I would think would be interesting to see in video format was a topic that Joe Thornton recently gave a talk about as part of the Darwin Speaker Series (the same one that Rosemary Grant came for).

His lab investigates evolutionary mechanisms through experiments with receptor proteins and gene function. He spoke to us about a series of experiments where they were attempting to reconstruct the evolutionary pathways of 2 receptors from a common ancestor.

Internet video is still new in terms of using it as a learning tool, but it has tons of appeal nowadays since it is so accessible. Every time I’ve given a presentation, I think about how I could use a video from YouTube to break up the monotony. Maybe there will come a day when most of my presentations will be made up of various videos!

As part of Columbia University’s Darwin Speaker Series, Rosemary Grant of Princeton University came to speak on April 14th, 2009 about evolution in Darwin’s finches.


This year being the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, and the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, it was fitting for Rosemary Grant to speak about her research on the island Daphne in the Galapagos Islands. The finches have radiated into over a dozen diagnosable species, some that share habitats and some living alone on their islands. The islands are so isolated that migrations are rare, but when they do occur, researchers are there to observe the events.

Rosemary is an interesting woman, and her husband and research partner, Peter, an interesting man. People may unknowingly assume they are a typical cute older couple when passing them on the street. But what they have seen during their years of research on a few small islands may surpass in scope anything we may hope to witness in any one of our lifetimes.

Over the past several years, Rosemary and Peter Grant have observed shifts in beak size and as well as instances of hybridization and a possible trend of introgression between 2 species. A hot topic that an outsider may not realize is that there is no “definition” of what is a species. Search on the internet for “species concept” and you will find over 100 million hits.

In her talk, Rosemary Grant do not specify a species concept, but do distinguish that there are points first where lineages are diagnosably different and then where they are no longer capable of interbreeding. This all occurs over evolutionary time, but the Grants have been able to observe some changes that suggest that episodic introgression is occurring where pre-mating barriers such as mating songs (learned behavior) and morphological differences (genetic) may be overcome.

Hybridization and introgression seem to be very important processes for speciation and other evolutionary processes. Another one of the main ideas from the lecture is that conservation is not simply about conserving a species. Rosemary put up two quotes at the end of her talk that represent this notion:

“Neither species nor environment are static entities. They’re dynamic and they are constantly changing.”

“To conserve species and their environment, we must keep them both capable of further change.”

Surely other researchers will continue the Grants’ work in the Galapagos. However, it still seems that the general public would not be able to understand how these studies are important to their daily lives. Conservation of natural ecological processes and functionally important species will be important in the future for conservation of ecosystems, and on the larger scale the biosphere. If there comes a day that the world’s ecosystems are so degraded that resources are being depleted in every way, then our human existence will be under threat (much like what I discussed in an earlier post).


Conservation biologists are often mistaken as simply being animal-lovers and tree-huggers with graduate degrees. Their work truly is much, much larger than that. With more communication of interesting work such as Rosemary Grant’s, and getting more opportunities for the general public to be exposed to the people doing the work, we may be able to bridge some of that gap.






Image credit (in order of appearance):

http://www.rphs.devisland.net/johnna_nicole/Images/Galapagos-bartolome-island.jpg

http://www.galapagosonline.com/Islands/islands/Daphne/daphne.jpg

http://people.rit.edu/rhrsbi/GalapagosPages/Pictures/LandBirds/FinchTypes.jpeg