Scientific American: New Clues for Improving Antibiotics for Tolerant Bacteria

Bacteria evolve.  We know this. Of course, this can cause some problems for those of us who have to deal with them.  No, not like in Doonesbury, but real life:

New Clues for Improving Antibiotics for Tolerant Bacteria

Some of the ways bacteria protect themselves from antibiotics might be used against them to strengthen existing drugs

The superbug MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) has provoked fear in doctors and patients alike because it is endowed with genetic characteristics that make it impervious to many antibiotics, and it can be deadly to boot. Less well known, however, is another class of bacteria that also resist antibiotics, but for reasons that have puzzled scientists. These bugs cause stubborn infections in ears and urinary tracts and post-surgical wounds, even though, from their genetic profiles, they should be perfectly good targets for antibiotics.

Researchers are now starting to figure out how these bacteria withstand antibiotic treatment: by exploiting the same traits that have helped them endure environmental stressors. Two new research papers, published Friday in Science, show how bacteria use their ability to withstand prolonged periods without food or exposure to reactive oxygen to also fight off antibiotics. Knowing what these defenses are could lead to new ways of making existing therapies more effective.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

What use is half a wing?

An oft repeated creationist canard is "What use is half a wing?" or something equally inane.  The University of Montana and the BBC shed some light on this that even a creationtard could possibly understand (assuming they got their fingers out of their ears long enough to listen).

Flap-running in birds is key to flight evolution

The ungainly sight of a bird furiously flapping its wings as its spindly legs propel it forward could be a peek at evolutionary history. 

"Flap-running", researchers say, may have been a key step in the evolution of flight.

Experiments with pigeons have shown that it helps birds ascend slopes and suggests the earliest flightless birds might have used the same technique.

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Brandon Jackson, from the University of Montana, US, who led the study, explained that he and his colleagues wanted to know why birds would flap-run when they were capable of flight.

His co-researcher, Ken Dial, noticed this behaviour when filming a type of partridge known as a chuckar.
As the rotund birds negotiated obstacles, they would run up the objects flapping their wings. When Dr Dial discussed this behaviour with local ranchers and hunters, some reported that adult chukars would flap to run up cliffs, rather than fly.

 

The birds used far less energy when flap-running than when flying

 

Dr Jackson and his team decided to find out if the birds might be using the technique to save energy by measuring the amount of power generated by the flight muscles when birds flew and when they were flap-running.

They surgically implanted electrodes into the flight muscles of pigeons - closely related birds that often flap and run even though they are very good fliers.

The electrodes measured muscle activity in the birds as they flapped and ran up ramps of varying inclines, and as they flew parallel to those same ramps.

The team was most surprised by what they saw when they compared the birds' muscle activity on a ramp with a 65 degree incline.

Running up that ramp, explained Dr Jackson, "required about 10% as much power from the flight muscles" as flying.

"The signal was imperceptible at first, and we actually thought we had a problem with the recording equipment. But when we zoomed in, there it was, about a tenth the magnitude that it was during flight," he said.

"The birds seemed to be using hardly any power to flap their wings as they ran up the slopes."

The method, the researchers say, is also an essential learning step for fledging chicks.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

Scientific American: Autism in Another Ape

Every time I hear anyone proclaim how unique humans are, I want to correct them.  We are animals just like any other animal.  And we have some very close cousins out there that demonstrate this all the time.  It's just that most of us are in our own little worlds that we don't ever notice.

Autism in Another Ape

Rambunctious one-year-old Teco, a third-generation captive-born bonobo at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, has an ape’s usual fondness for games and grapes. But perhaps because of trauma from a difficult birth (his mother was in labor for 60 hours) or a genetic predisposition, Teco is different from his bonobo peers in ways that resemble autism in young children. He could not cling to his mother or nurse the way healthy young apes do instinctively, mimicking the aversion to physical contact seen in children with autism. Teco also tends to fixate on shiny objects and avoids eye contact, and he has trouble coordinating his four limbs. A genetic analysis of bonobos, already under way, may shed light on Teco’s condition and offer new perspectives on autism’s genetic roots in humans.

Evilution II - Caveman Boogaloo

Bryan Fischer joins the three pronged attack on Evilution where he has four points that disprove evolution and thus prove Governor Rick Perry as awesome and on the ball, not a backward hick with no knowledge of science.


Bryan Fischer is normally a hate filled sorry excuse for a human being whose crusade to deny homosexuals basic rights is well known. But here he dabbles his feet in the murky waters of creationism to defend Rick Perry which just is pathetic. He parrots out old hackneyed defences of creationism that simply don't even stand up to the mildest of scrutiny.

Evilution I - The Dawkinator

All Power to the Hypno-Dawkins


Part one of today's posts consists of wailing on the Washington Post's very own Jordan Sekulow, Lawyer and someone who Just Does Not Get Atheism. Which is perfectly fine, not everyone gets it. It's a choice to not get it, just like it is a choice to correct his misconceptions with how atheism, evolution and the world works.

The Vaccine Times: Universal Flu Vaccine Another Step Closer, But Still Far

This is exciting news, even though we still have a long way to go.  I suppose that even though this aligns with one of the goals of the anti-vax pro-disease nutters (i.e. fewer vaccines), I bet they will still find a fault in this line of research as well.  One of the hallmarks of their irrational thinking and poor logic is that nothing will ever make them happy.  I think one of the cool things about this research is that our understanding of molecular level evolution led us down this path.  Here we consistently hit on two of the most irrational denialisms on the planet in one post!

On the Apr-Jun 2011 issue of  The Vaccine Times we reported on a new flu shot being tested which could do away with our need for yearly flu shots.  The vaccine candidate, called VAX102 is based on an antibody called F16 which can target a common protein shared by all Influenza A viruses which are the most virulent and the most prone to mutation influenza viruses.

Recently U.S. scientists are reporting the finding of a new antibody which can tackle 30 of the 36 known strains of H1N1 (a virus of the A type) flu virus. The newly discovered antibody, called CH65, can stick to the surface part of the flu virus known as hemagglutinin which mutates every season, forcing the formulation of a new vaccine every year.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

Genetic Switch for Limbs and Digits Found in Primitive Fish

The fact that genetics time and again supports evolution at the molecular level amazes me.  Not because the support is amazing, but because here is a field of science that came around more than 100 years after Darwin wrote his book, and it matches up!  If evolution was somehow a fraud or in danger of being overturned, the level of fraud to have Darwin's book and ideas be supported at this level of science would be simply mind-boggling.  He would have had to have had a time machine or something to pull it off.  Either that, or he was simply correct, and the molecular genetics is yet one more prediction made by science that was in the end supported.  Isn't it great when science actually works?

Genetic Switch for Limbs and Digits Found in Primitive Fish: Before Animals First Walked On Land, Fish Carried Gene Program for Limbs

Genetic instructions for developing limbs and digits were present in primitive fish millions of years before their descendants first crawled on to land, researchers have discovered.

Genetic switches control the timing and location of gene activity. When a particular switch taken from fish DNA is placed into mouse embryos, the segment can activate genes in the developing limb region of embryos, University of Chicago researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The successful swap suggests that the recipe for limb development is conserved in species separated by 400 million years of evolution.

"The genetic switches that drive the expression of genes in the digits of mice are not only present in fish, but the fish sequence can actually activate the expression in mice," said Igor Schneider, PhD, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago and lead author on the paper. "This tells us how the antecedents of the limb go back in time at every level, from fossils to genes."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE

I have always stated that the theory of evolution is so ingrained in everyday life, that to deny it is incredibly hypocritical, unless you sequester yourself off in a cave somewhere.  Pretty much EVERY advance in modern medicine comes from our understanding of evolution.  In the best of my fantasy worlds, all deniers of evolution would be denied the benefits we have learned from its understanding.

Now, I don't agree 100% with this particular author (I find him too accommodating to creationists and IDiots), but he has a very good point.

Book Makes Case For Using Evolution In Everyday Life

Evolution is not just about human origins, dinosaurs and fossils, says Binghamton University evolutionist David Sloan Wilson. It can also be applied to almost every aspect of human life, as he demonstrates in his first book for a general audience, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (Bantam Press 2007).

Using witty, straightforward language and compelling anecdotes, Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution in a way that can be easily understood by non-experts. He then uses the principles to explain phenomena as diverse as why beetles commit infanticide, why dogs have curly tails, and why people laugh and make art.

Wilson, a distinguished professor of biological sciences with a joint appointment in anthropology at Binghamton University, is convinced that evolution can become more widely accepted once its consequences for human welfare are appropriately understood.

"When evolution is presented as unthreatening, explanatory, and useful, it can be easily grasped and appreciated by most people, regardless of their religious or political beliefs and without previous training," says Wilson.

Butterfly Study Sheds Light On Convergent Evolution

A classic creationist canard is to find something that science may not have figured out yet, and proclaim, "therefore my supernatural entity did it!"  That is just plain wrong.  Not having an answer yet is no reason to substitute in a totally unfounded and unsupportable answer of "magic" in its place.  Especially when eventually science does figure it out!  Then the unnecessary "magic" answer seems really silly (which it was all along to people who subscribe to reality).

One of the stumper questions was Convergent Evolution.  It just seemed like a weird thing that happened in nature, and whe knew that it provided a benefit (the why), but the how was puzzling.  So this article is all part of replacing the magic with an actual how explanation.

Butterfly Study Sheds Light On Convergent Evolution: Single Gene Controls Mimicry Across Different Species

For 150 years scientists have been trying to explain convergent evolution. One of the best-known examples of this is how poisonous butterflies from different species evolve to mimic each other's color patterns -- in effect joining forces to warn predators, "Don't eat us," while spreading the cost of this lesson.

Now an international team of researchers led by Robert Reed, UC Irvine assistant professor of ecology & evolutionary biology, has solved part of the mystery by identifying a single gene called optix responsible for red wing color patterns in a wide variety of passion vine butterfly species. The result of 10 years of work, the finding is detailed in a paper that appears online July 21 in the journal Science.

"This is our first peek into how mimicry and convergent evolution happen at a genetic level," Reed said. "We discovered that the same gene controls the evolution of red color patterns across remotely related butterflies.
"This is in line with emerging evidence from various animal species that evolution generally is governed by a relatively small number of genes. Out of the tens of thousands in a typical genome, it seems that only a handful tend to drive major evolutionary change over and over again."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

Darryl Cunningham: Evolution

I was a bit reluctant to post this link, only because no matter how simple you make it to someone who denies evolution, they will try to discount it.  And then you get trapped in trying to make it more simple, until it finally degenerates the very complex process into a caricature, which is really what the denialists already had in their mind.  Also, this particular link also ends up dealing with the "poo flinging ape" problem.  I find that all too often, creationists and evolution deniers will demand that every single mechanism be explained to them, and no matter how many explanations are provided, they only remember the final instance when they finally managed to ask about a process the explainer was not familiar with.  A very specific item I even deal with at the main Facts, not Fantasy Evolution page (see the last item).

Evolution

Here then is the beta version of my strip about evolution. This is a chapter of the book Science Stories which will be out from Myriad Editions next spring. I'm sure there'll be mistakes here, so do feel free to point them out, so that I can make the necessary changes. Thank you.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST!

Science Daily: Errors in Protein Structure Sparked Evolution of Biological Complexity

A common refrain from theists about evolution and why they don't believe it is because they can't accept that humans are the end product of "chance" (i.e. following just laws of biology, physics, chemistry, etc. without any guidance).  The idea that we're all some sort of cosmic mistake seems to insult their sense of worth or importance.  So I read this article with a certain sense of amusement.

Errors in Protein Structure Sparked Evolution of Biological Complexity

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2011) — Over four billion years of evolution, plants and animals grew far more complex than their single-celled ancestors. But a new comparison of proteins shared across species finds that complex organisms, including humans, have accumulated structural weaknesses that may have actually launched the long journey from microbe to man.

The study, published in Nature, suggests that the random introduction of errors into proteins, rather than traditional natural selection, may have boosted the evolution of biological complexity. Flaws in the "packing" of proteins that make them more unstable in water could have promoted protein interactions and intracellular teamwork, expanding the possibilities of life.

"Everybody wants to say that evolution is equivalent to natural selection and that things that are sophisticated and complex have been absolutely selected for," said study co-author Ariel Fernández, PhD, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and senior researcher at the Mathematics Institute of Argentina (IAM) in Buenos Aires. "What we are claiming here is that inefficient selection creates a niche or an opportunity to evolve complexity."

"This is a novel bridge between protein chemistry and evolutionary biology," said co-author Michael Lynch, PhD, professor of biology at Indiana University. "I hope that it causes us to pause and think about how evolution operates in new ways that we haven't thought about before."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

15 answers for creationists

In the past few days there has been a new drive by Creation Ministries International in conjunction with Traditional Values Coalition called “Question Evolution” with the focus of restarting the whole Creationist vs. Evolution debate.

15 Questions for Evolutionists

The idea is that recent religious conservatism has increased the chance that creationists can achieve something lasting to spread their superstition in our schools. To help with this they have constructed a leaflet with 15 questions meant to stump the “evolutionist”.

Evolution Does Not Work This Way! Goodnight!!!

  

Before we start, an important thing to remember is that there is no such thing as an evolutionist. There are scientists who believe in the scientific approach who understand evolution takes place and various mechanisms for it. The opposition are not scientists but people who are attempting to disguise religion under the guise of science to push their faith. They do not want to debate science, but want to squeeze their faith into the biology class rooms where it can be taught as a scientific fact.

Evolution in a picture

I really have nothing to add to this.  It's a great explanation in more ways than one.

Despicalbe Human Being gets Just Rewards (Oh, and FISH)

Today a despicable human being who claimed the title of "Doctor" lost his privileges to that because of his abuses and rejection of reality.  Yet this is the sort of person that so many people end up going to because the aren't satisfied with the current state of knowledge (or lack thereof) when dealing with autism.  Sadly, I am afraid this will not serve as a lesson to the quacks that behave like this excuse for a medical practitioner, nor will it warn off frustrated and tired parents from similar pro-disease wackjobs.  I think Dr. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy summed it up quite well:

I do so love to report these wins for reality, as rare as they are: the very vocal antivax advocate Mark Geier has had his medical license revoked in Maryland. Why?

The Maryland State Board of Physicians reviewed nine cases of autistic children seen by Geier, of which he treated seven. Of those nine, the Board found he misdiagnosed six of them. He (mis)diagnosed them with "precocious puberty", a medical condition where kids have extremely early onset of puberty. Why would he do such a thing? Well, this condition can be treated with Lupron, a drug which lowers testosterone (it’s used to chemically castrate adult men). Geier happens to think Lupron can also help autism — despite there being no evidence at all that’s the case — which makes his diagnosis very suspect. It implies strongly that he used the precocious puberty diagnosis as an excuse to prescribe the drug.

By the way, Lupron costs $5000 – $6000 a month to administer. The side effects can be severe as well, including seizures, and it’s known that autistic children are prone to seizures. That’s why the Board wrote that Geier’s treatment "exposed the children to needless risk of harm, " (pp 12 – 13). As far as his medical expertise, the Board also wrote that Geier’s "assessment and treatment of autistic children as described herein, however, far exceeds his qualifications and expertise" (p. 13). That dry assessment does nothing to convey the horror I felt reading the Board’s document, though. In several cases, he didn’t even diagnose the children in person. 

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE POST.

For more information, feel free to go to sites like Harpocrates Speaks, Seth Mnookin, and Orac.  These folks really get into the details.

Oh, did I mention FISH in the title?  My good friend IVAN3MAN sent me a link from the BBC that caught my interest, and I figured that I would share this one as well. It's an interesting article about how we betray our fishy origins every time one of us is conceived and gestates.  And we still bear the marks after we are born, yet never think about it.  Here is a quick excerpt from the article:

Anatomical clues to human evolution from fish

By Dr Michael Mosley

It may seem strange that humans have evolved from fish, but the evidence can be found not just in fossils but also within our own bodies.

Your face is your most expressive feature; it tells the world what you are feeling, who you are and where you come from. Although no two faces are exactly the same, they share a number of common characteristics; a couple of eyes, a nose, a mouth and a philtrum.

The philtrum is the groove on your top lip that lies just beneath your nose. You see it every day in the mirror so you probably never think about it.

It has no obvious function. Instead it is an accident of our origins, a clue to our fishy past and how our faces first formed.

Your face is formed in the womb in the first couple of months of life, from when you were the size of a grain of rice to when you were the size of a kidney bean.
The video (above) of a growing human face shows how this process happens. It has been created from high quality scans of human embryos at early stages of development, provided by universities and hospitals.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE

Popular Mechanics: Bill Nye the Science Guy

Science and reality doesn't care or even register about what you believe. Evolution will continue to be a fact, and it is inescapable. Just try denying evolution next time you go to the hospital! I wish teachers had more integrity and resources, and parents weren't allowed to spread Weapon Grade Stupid on their children...  So I really enjoyed reading what Bill Nye had to say on the subject.  I think a couple of key highlights are worth posting here.  I know it's a short article, so just posting these two questions/answers pretty much gets 1/3 of the article, but I encourage you to visit it and read more.

In a recent survey of 926 public high school biology teachers across the nation, only 28 percent of teachers taught evolution as a well-supported fundamental idea of science. Meanwhile, 13 percent openly supported "intelligent design" in the classroom, and 60 percent fell somewhere in-between. This majority presented evolution cautiously—by including non-scientific viewpoints, by limiting discussion to genetics, or by saying that students only needed to learn the material to pass exams.

What do you think about this?

Bill Nye, Executive Director of the Planetary Society: It's horrible. Science is the key to our future, and if you don't believe in science, then you're holding everybody back. And it's fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don't believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don't believe in science, that's a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.

Should teachers be mandated to teach evolution as fact?

What other fundamental theory in all of biology is there? Intelligent design, as the judge in Dover, Penn., said, is "breathtaking inanity." It was so stupid it took his breath away. I agree with him. It's great to teach in history class, though. People believed the earth was the center of the universe. People believed the earth was flat. It was reasonable at the time, but we don't learn about those ideas in science class.

Read more: Evolution in Science Education – Bill Nye on Evolution in Science Education - Popular Mechanics

New Link

I received a very nice email today, and have added a new link to the links page.

http://www.lessoncorner.com/Science/Biology/Evolution

At LessonCorner our goal is not only to create the best collection of worksheets and lesson plans on the web, but also to make it free. Our freemium business model allows all users to access many of the site's features. In addition, users can receive a free 1 year premium membership by sharing their lessons and worksheets with the community.

I encourage anyone who is an educator to give this site a look.  As we all know, many states are systematically limiting teacher's access to good material on teaching evolution.

Grades of 50 states and the District of Columbia evaluated on the inclusion of evolution in state science standards. The darker the state is shaded, the worse grade it received. Graphic courtesy of the National Center for Science Education.

Although, I must express my surprise at the grade Kansas got. Maybe because they have done so much dumbtardery in the past, they realize they are under scrutiny?

Zero Speaks: 10 Arguments you should not use against evolution.

I found a couple of videos that I enjoyed that folks should watch. The first one applies to evolution arguments, like I outline here, and here.  Enjoy.

SciAm: Dawn of the Deed: the Origin of Sex

Just read the full article in my print version of the magazine.  This blurb and video link to the cover story.  Sadly, it's things like this that lead the ignorant and deluded to proclaim that because we learn more, the whole structure of the theory is falling apart.  How little they actually understand science:

Dawn of the Deed: the Origin of Sex [Video]

Evidence of reproduction by internal fertilization has been discovered in a large group of ancient jawed fish. Embryos discovered within fossils of these animals confirm that live birth in prehistoric times was much more widespread than previously thought. Watch the researchers talk about the fossils and techniques used to find them.

By Kate Wong   

Scientists used to think that, among backboned animals, internal fertilization and carrying the young inside the mother's body originated in sharks and their kin some 350 million years ago. Before then, sexual reproduction in fish consisted of spawning, wherein females deposit eggs in the water, the males fertilize them, and the embryos then develop out in the open. Or so the story went.

As the cover story of the January 2011 Scientific American explains, recent analyses of fossils found in a remote locale in northwestern Australia and elsewhere have shown that intercourse and live birth actually arose millions of years earlier than previously believed—and in a more primitive group of fish than the one to which sharks belong. These fish—called placoderms—reside on the long line of animals leading us, and their sexual equipment gave rise to our own reproductive system and other parts of our anatomy.

In this video paleontologist John A. Long of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, author of the cover story, discusses a fossil central to this new view of the origin of copulation and live birth: a 375-million-year-old expectant mother fish dubbed Materpiscis attenboroughi.

One of the most incredibly useful tools (and also misunderstood by ignorant and uneducated general populations) is DNA.  That everything about DNA supports the theory of evolution, even though we really didn't have any insight into it until relatively recently speaks to the robustness of the theory of evolution.  Not only does DNA help us learn about the biological processes of evolution, but even other historical events in our development as a society!  Of course, this requires the study of DNA from our parasites and other creatures.  Enjoy this article, and feel free to follow up on the science.

Lice DNA Study Shows Humans First Wore Clothes 170,000 Years Ago

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2011) — A new University of Florida study following the evolution of lice shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, a technology which enabled them to successfully migrate out of Africa.

Principal investigator David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, studies lice in modern humans to better understand human evolution and migration patterns. His latest five-year study used DNA sequencing to calculate when clothing lice first began to diverge genetically from human head lice.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study is available online and appears in this month's print edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution.

"We wanted to find another method for pinpointing when humans might have first started wearing clothing," Reed said. "Because they are so well adapted to clothing, we know that body lice or clothing lice almost certainly didn't exist until clothing came about in humans."

The data shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 70,000 years before migrating into colder climates and higher latitudes, which began about 100,000 years ago. This date would be virtually impossible to determine using archaeological data because early clothing would not survive in archaeological sites.
The study also shows humans started wearing clothes well after they lost body hair, which genetic skin-coloration research pinpoints at about 1 million years ago, meaning humans spent a considerable amount of time without body hair and without clothing, Reed said.

"It's interesting to think humans were able to survive in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without clothing and without body hair, and that it wasn't until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world," Reed said.

Lice are studied because unlike most other parasites, they are stranded on lineages of hosts over long periods of evolutionary time. The relationship allows scientists to learn about evolutionary changes in the host based on changes in the parasite.

Applying unique data sets from lice to human evolution has only developed within the last 20 years, and provides information that could be used in medicine, evolutionary biology, ecology or any number of fields, Reed said.

"It gives the opportunity to study host-switching and invading new hosts -- behaviors seen in emerging infectious diseases that affect humans," Reed said.

A study of clothing lice in 2003 led by Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated humans first began wearing clothes about 107,000 years ago. But the UF research includes new data and calculation methods better suited for the question.

"The new result from this lice study is an unexpectedly early date for clothing, much older than the earliest solid archaeological evidence, but it makes sense," said Ian Gilligan, lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University. "It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to Ice Age conditions."

The last Ice Age occurred about 120,000 years ago, but the study's date suggests humans started wearing clothes in the preceding Ice Age 180,000 years ago, according to temperature estimates from ice core studies, Gilligan said. Modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago.

Because archaic hominins did not leave descendants of clothing lice for sampling, the study does not explore the possibility archaic hominins outside of Africa were clothed in some fashion 800,000 years ago. But while archaic humans were able to survive for many generations outside Africa, only modern humans persisted there until the present.

"The things that may have made us much more successful in that endeavor hundreds of thousands of years later were technologies like the controlled use of fire, the ability to use clothing, new hunting strategies and new stone tools," Reed said.

Study co-authors were Melissa Toups of Indiana University and Andrew Kitchen of The Pennsylvania State University, both previously with UF. Co-author Jessica Light of Texas A&M University was formerly a post-doctoral fellow at the Florida Museum. The researchers completed the project with the help of Reed's NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, which is granted to researchers who exemplify the teacher-researcher role.

SciAm: Getting a Leg Up on Evolution--the Comic Book Version

One of the biggest problems in teaching the fact of evolution is that children get brainwashed by ignorant parents before they have a chance to learn about reality.  These parents are ignorant about evolution because they themselves have not been taught about it, so they have misconceptions and faulty knowledge that perpetrates the mistakes and lies of others.  As such, I was pleased to find this particular article at Scientific American:

Getting a Leg Up on Evolution--the Comic Book Version

A graphic tour of how we humans came to be, through the eyes of space aliens Bloort and Prince Floorsh

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt of the graphic book, "Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth" (Hill and Wang, 2011). It was written by noted comic-book author and professor of biology Jay Hosler and illustrated by the award-winning duo Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.