As seen on Carnival of Evolution, #55

The new installment of Carnival of Evolution (#55) is now live. A lot of interesting posts on theoretical biology, evolutionary methods, the latest papers from the scientific literature, and the practice of science. Thanks to Suzanne Elvidge at the Genome Engineering blog for her New Year's Resolution themed presentation. A post from my microblog (Tumbld Thoughts) was featured [1]. If you would like to submit to Carnival of Evolution for an upcoming month or host (they are always interested in contributors), the organizers would love to hear from you.

Reposted from Tumbld Thoughts (December 5):

Here is a link to the Evolution episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos [2] series. Carl Sagan had a way of making scientific concepts seem so simple, yet at the same time so profound.

Above are two visual representations of evolution [3] taken from the video:

1) evolutionary transitions from the first plants (8:30) to cell colonies (8:56).

2) evolution of sea life from polyps with tentacles (9:26) to the first ancestral fishes (filter feeders with gill slits - 9:40).

NOTES:

[1] No posts from Synthetic Daisies in CoE this month. Just didn't have a chance to create a longer-ish, evolution-related post last month (I tend to use my microblog for shorter features, or for less polished profiles and features).

[2] a reboot of Cosmos is planned for the near future (hosted by Neil Degrasse Tyson and produced by Seth MacFarlane).

[3] progression of time in video is roughly proportional to elapsed evolutionary time.