318 research outputs found
Science Behind, Around, and After Trees Response
No full textThis is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Bioscience following peer review. The version of record Jenner, R. A. (2015). "Response to Stach." BioScience 65(2): 119-120. is available online at:10.1093/biosci/biu214.NHM Repositor
Macroevolution of Animal Body Plans: Is There Science after the Tree?
No full textThis is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in BioScience following peer review. The version of record [Ronald A. Jenner; Macroevolution of Animal Body Plans: Is There Science after the Tree?. BioScience 2014; 64 (8): 653-664. doi: 10.1093/biosci/biu099] is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/biosci/biu099 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu099 The attached file is the pre-publication, uncorrected proof version of the article.NHM Repositor
Doctor Jenner of Berkeley
No full textDr. Jenner of BerkeleyBerkeley -- The boy -- The journey to London: 1770 -- Advances in surgical training -- London: 1770-1773 -- Life in Jermyn Street -- Return to Berkeley: 1773 -- Letters from the dear man -- Balloons and the tartar emetic -- Cuckoos -- Family life -- Interlude: smallpox inoculation -- "The origin of the vaccine inoculation" -- The inquiry -- Running into storms -- Vaccination spreads around the world -- Fame -- The evidence at large -- The Hertford Street fiasco -- Village doctor -- An herpetic state of the skin -- Financial rewards -- Years of loss -- The last daysIncludes references to Dr. John Clinch of Trinity and the testing of the smallpox vaccine in NewfoundlandIncludes bibliographical references and inde
Evolution Is Linear: Debunking Life's Little Joke
No full textLinear depictions of the evolutionary process are ubiquitous in popular culture, but linear evolutionary imagery is strongly rejected by scientists who argue that evolution branches. This point is frequently illustrated by saying that we didn't evolve from monkeys, but that we are related to them as collateral relatives. Yet, we did evolve from monkeys, but our monkey ancestors are extinct, not extant. Influential voices, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould, have misled audiences for decades by falsely portraying the linear and branching aspects of evolution to be in conflict, and by failing to distinguish between the legitimate linearity of evolutionary descent, and the branching relationships among collateral relatives that result when lineages of ancestors diverge. The purpose of this article is to correct the widespread misplaced rejection of linear evolutionary imagery, and to re‐emphasize the basic truth that the evolutionary process is fundamentally linear.This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Jenner, R. A. (2018), Evolution Is Linear: Debunking Life's Little Joke. BioEssays, 40: 1700196. doi:10.1002/bies.201700196, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201700196. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.NHM Repositor
A Polychaete’s Powerful Punch: Venom Gland Transcriptomics of Glycera Reveals a Complex Cocktail of Toxin Homologs
No full text© The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The article attached is the publisher's pdf.NHM Repositor
Idalatry
No full textThe Palaeontology Newsletter contains a mixture of palaeontological news, book reviews, reviews of past meetings, details of forthcoming meetings as well as a series of regular discussion features. Copies of the Newsletter from Issue 27 onward are available online.NHM Repositor
The tyranny of history the roots of China's crisis
No full textOver a quarter of the human race lives within the borders of China, the empire that has outlasted all its rivals from the Roman to the British. But, claims the author of this sweeping and provocative study, the Chinese empire is in terminal crisis, a crisis that goes much deeper than the decline of the current regime and threatens the survival both of China as a unified state and of the high tradition and culture that span more than three thousand years. According toProfessor Jenner, China has been both held together and held back by the tyranny of its history, by a culture and an education system that have always looked back, have rooted authority in the past and have inhibited creative thinking. Although in this century the orthodoxy has borrowed the language of Marxism, 'revolutionary' history has contrived to celebrate the authoritarian values of the imperial bureaucracy and the single orthodox tradition of pre-revolutionaryChina. The tyranny of China's past is not simply a matter of history and politics, however, but derives equally from the Chinese writing system, which is inherently authoritarian, and the Chinese family, which inhibits both individuality and a sense of citizenship and provides the building blocks of the autocratic state. The very successes of pre-modern China's productive technology have left the present with an ecological nightmare that recent economic growth has onl
The first venomous crustacean revealed by transcriptomics and functional morphology: remipede venom glands express a unique toxin cocktail dominated by enzymes and a neurotoxin
No full textAnimal venoms have evolved many times. Venomous species are especially common in three of the four main groups of arthropods (Chelicerata, Myriapoda, Hexapoda), which together represent tens of thousands of species of venomous spiders, scorpions, centipedes and hymenopterans. Surprisingly, despite their great diversity of body plans there is no unambiguous evidence that any crustacean is venomous. We provide the first conclusive evidence that the aquatic, blind and cave-dwelling remipede crustaceans are venomous, and that venoms evolved in all four major arthropod groups. We produced a three-dimensional reconstruction of the venom delivery apparatus of the remipede Speleonectes tulumensis, showing that remipedes can inject venom in a controlled manner. A transcriptomic profile of its venom glands shows that they express a unique cocktail of transcripts coding for known venom toxins, including a diversity of enzymes and a probable paralytic neurotoxin very similar to one described from spider venom. We screened a transcriptomic library obtained from whole animals and identified a non-toxin paralogue of the remipede neurotoxin that is not expressed in the venom glands. This allowed us to reconstruct its probable evolutionary origin, and underlines the importance of incorporating data derived from non-venom gland tissue to elucidate the evolution of candidate venom proteins. This first glimpse into the venom of a crustacean and primitively aquatic arthropod reveals conspicuous differences from the venoms of other predatory arthropods such as centipedes, scorpions and spiders, and contributes valuable information for ultimately disentangling the many factors shaping the biology and evolution of venoms and venomous species
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