Icing the kicker

Following up on the earlier thread, it looks like icing the kicker/shooter might actually work.

Math Trek: The Iced Foot Effect, Science News Online, Nov. 13, 2004: "Using their model, Berry and Wood calculate that, for an average kicker, the estimated probability of a successful 40-yard kick in sunny weather is 0.759. The estimated probability under the same conditions for an average kicker who has been iced is 0.659."

Evolution of Menopause

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Children Took a Toll in Pre-Industrial Societies, May Have Driven Evolution of Menopause -- The high costs of too many offspring may have shaped the psychology of women and could explain plunging modern-day birth rates

This one doesn't seem to add up to me. Evolution has always seemed relatively insensitive to lifespan. Lifespan varies widely between creatures of similar complexity. Take some very evolved squid that only live one year or turtles that live 300.

Consequently, menopause would not seem to be a huge advantage or disadvantage, especially given that until very recent times average lifespan was much less than 50 years.

It would also seem that beyond age two to four, the survival of offspring would seem uncorrelated to the survival of the mother, especially given humans have always seemed to live in larger social units.

I guess I would need to do some more research to see if we believe monkeys and other primates live long enough to reach an equivalent menopausal age to understand if this truly is a recent adaptation. Assuming the article is correct, then what would the selection pressure be?

Perhaps if children born after age 50 had a negative impact on the success of other offspring that could create an evolutionary advantage for those families who didn't birth children at that age?

Or perhaps if the survival of early matriarchal societies were improved by the presence of elder matriarchs, then those that were no longer child-bearing and thus lived longer would confer some advantage to the society?

Brain Evoluntion Stabilizing

More discussion on how parts of the genome evolve at different rates.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Genes Expressed in Brain Evolving at a Medium Pace -- Even mice brains evolve faster than human brains, and our complexity may be the culprit: "'We found that genes expressed in the human brain have in fact slowed down in their evolution, contrary to some earlier reports,' states Chung-I Wu, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the co-author of a study appearing in the most recent issue of PLoS Biology. 'The more complex the brain, it seems, the more difficult it becomes for brain genes to change.'"

Hybridization as a means of speciation...

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Two species become one in the lab: "The study demonstrates that two animal species can evolve to form one, instead of the more common scenario where one species diverges to form two."

Yet another twist in the evolutionary process. Rated a top-10 science article of 2006 by BBC News.

Small changes in DNA strand lead to big changes in eye color

Blue, green, brown eyes are controlled by a very few base pairs. Given these aren't in a protein encoding, this is a signaling structure? Or perhaps there are regions of DNA in which simple modification/mutation/Mendel'ing genetics play out to bigger consequences in more stable portions? Kind of an overlay-configuration on top of a largely stable base configuration?

I still want to know if the rate of base-pair-change frequency is uniform across the entire genome or is it far more stable in certain areas and very dynamic in others?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Genetics of eye colour unlocked: "'When OCA2 is knocked out, there is a loss of pigmentation. The position of these SNPs right at the start of the gene means it is possible we're looking at a change in the regulation of the gene in people with blue eye colour.'"

Komodo dragons can reproduce asexually

Ok, if this isn't proof that evolutionary biology is more complex than our simplistic Mendel'ing models suggest I don't know what is.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Virgin births' for giant lizards

Meditate before you take that shot!

When you're shooting a basketball, which screws you up more -- neural inconsistencies before you shoot, or while you're shooting?

These Stanford neuroscientists show that some or much of it comes from before you shoot. Makes sense to me. Coordinated muscle movements are well-trained, while the neurochemical conditions (hungry, in love, angry, excited) in which you're about to shoot seem to be all-over-the-map.

An interesting related question would be -- does calling a timeout to ice the free-throw shooter work? If so, it seems that would add credence to this study.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Why You Can't Shoot the Same Foul Shot Twice -- Repeated motions differ slightly because of the brain's planning mechanism and muscle contractions.

by Nikhil Swaminathan: "'The bottom line is the neural recordings can explain upcoming velocity variability as well as muscle recordings can,' says Afsheen Afshar, a graduate student who worked on the study. He adds that off-line activity probably accounts for half of movement variability, whereas on-line effects influence the other half."

Adult lactase tolerance arose twice...

Natural selection appears to have favored humans tolerant to lactose in their adulthood, especially in early cow-raising societies. Different genetic mechanisms appear to have arose independently in Europe and Africa.


Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution - New York Times: "After testing for lactose tolerance and genetic makeup among 43 ethnic groups of East Africa, she and her colleagues have found three new mutations, all independent of each other and of the European mutation, which keep the lactase gene permanently switched on."