Origin of Life Initiatives

by Richard William Nelson | Nov 20, 2012

Erasmus DarwinIn the beginning, the transition from physics and chemistry to biology laid the foundation for Earth’s vast biosphere. In 1794, Erasmus Darwin (pictured left), Charles’s grandfather, entered the origin of life fray with his popular book Zoonomia, noting –

“Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament?”

Amazingly, while every known early culture recorded an explanation of the origin of life, it remains one of modern science’s most profound mysteries. As Charles Darwin notes in The Origin of Species in 1859 –

“It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity?”

Continue Reading

New Bird Tree of Life

by Richard William Nelson | Nov 6, 2012

Bird Tree of Life JetzScientists last week proposed new evolutionary relationships among all 9,993 of the world’s known living bird species. In a letter published in the prestigious Nature journal, scientists reported on the use of DNA-sequence data to create a radiating phylogenetic tree, a revolutionary new bird tree of life (pictured left).

Walter Jetz (pictured right), an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, was the leading author of the letter entitled “The global diversity of birds in space and time.” In an interview with science writer Virginia Gewin for Nature News, Jetz explains –

“This is the first dated tree of life for a class of species this size to be put on a global map.”

Continue Reading