On the supposed bottleneck 70,000 years ago 3 May 2008 John Hawks has a very nice post for people with basic math, explaining why a recent press release announced that 70,000 years ago the human species encountered a population bottleneck of 2000 individuals, and why it’s most likely wrong. In the process he explains effective population size. It’s a tad too complex even for an Intermediate Concepts post, but still worth the effort. Larry Moran at his blog has opened a comments thread, as the Hawks blog is comment free (I am unsure if I should be censorial or jealous), and John promises to come back and answer them. Evolution General Science Species and systematics
History The classification of clouds 26 Nov 201228 Nov 2012 [A segment of my new book, coauthored with Malte Ebach] The classification of clouds Clouds were regarded as so subjective, fleeting and resistant to classification that they were a byword for the failure of empirical classification, until Luke Howard in 1802 proposed the foundation for our present system of cloud… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Barcoding redux 17 Mar 200818 Sep 2017 So, here I am in Phoenix airport, waiting to go back home, and I read T Ryan Gregory’s snark about me and barcoding. Apparently I am to learn only from his blog posts and not from (perish the thought) critics. One should never attend to critics. My crime was, of… Read More
Evolution The “design” mistake 18 Feb 2008 Back when Darwin was a student at Cambridge, he read, and almost memorised the Rev William Paley’s Natural Theology, and thereafter remained impressed by the obvious adaptiveness of the parts of organisms and their interrelations. As is well known, he gave an explanation differently to Paley’s external intelligence that designs… Read More