evolution
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here>
Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much other than an interest in new species underpinning it for all that there were a slew of experts involved in the choice, so I fail to see what the Bleiman Bros. are bitching about. Just like lists of the Best Songs of All Time, beauty and significance lie in the eyes of the beholder. What is significant is that thousands of new species were named and…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2008
Two of my favourite philosophers, Ingo Brigandt and Alan Love, have just published an extremely useful and relatively complete summary essay on "Reductionism in Biology" at the Stanford Encyclopedia. They clearly identify the issues and confusions, which is what an encyclopedia article ought to do.
If I have a criticism, it is that they do not attend, as most modern philosophy doesn't, to the nineteenth century origins of this debate. I mean not only Mill, but Whewell, Jevons and all those who debated the relationship between scientific theories. Those who began the twentieth century…
gregladen | May 27, 2008The Answers in Genesis Creation Museum of Kentucky is planing to expand. Some of the expansion will be internal ... the construction of additional kiosks. Some will be external, including the construction of a playground. All of the planned expansion efforts will be targeted towards children.
Ken Ham, director of the museum, also indicated in a recent interview that the purpose of the museum was to convert people to Christianity. This is something that should be noted by any public schools planning on sending children to this facility.
[source]
evolgen | May 27, 2008
In his classic book from 1976, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the meme. Basically, a meme can be thought of as a cultural gene -- an idea that is transmitted in a population.
This being Dawkins, memetics has a certain adaptationist flavor to it. The Selfish Gene introduces evolution from the gene's eye view. But Dawkins is a staunch advocate of natural selection as the primary driving force behind evolution. The debate over the role of natural selection in evolution has been carried out using empirical data, theoretical modeling, and philosophical arguments. I…
razib | May 27, 2008Current Vitamin D Recommendations Fraction Of Safe, Perhaps Essential Levels For Children:
The current recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamin D for children is 200 International Units (IUs), but new research reveals that children may need and can safely take ten-times that amount. According to new research this order-of-magnitude increase could improve the bone health of children worldwide and may have other long-term health benefits.
There are two counterposing factors for me when processing these sorts of medical findings. First, I am cautious about overreacting based on new medical…
sa smith | May 26, 2008
This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that!
I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;)
Poor Behe. Its a hard-knock life, for kooks. Another HIV-1 paper came out today that utilized the evolution of Vpu to make their experiments work better. So I thought Id better move this post over so you all could enjoy it again :)
August 2, 2007, over six months ago, I…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2008
Peter Bebergal has a lovely, lyrical and wistful piece on Nextbook, on how scriptural literalism and creationism destroys what is best in religious imagination. Go read it.
pharyngula | May 25, 2008
It's another transitional form, this time an amphibian from the Permian that shares characteristics of both frogs and salamanders — in life, it would have looked like a short-tailed, wide-headed salamander with frog-like ears, which is why it's being called a "frogamander".
Complete specimen in ventral view, photograph (left) and interpretive outline drawing (right). Abbreviations: bc, basale commune; cl, cleithrum; cv, clavicle; dm, digital elements of the manus; dt3, distal tarsal 3; fe, femur; h, humerus; ic, intercentrum; il, ilium; is, ischium; op, olecranon process of ulna; pc,…
evolvingthoughts | May 24, 2008
Nothing is more excruciating to me than to see myself and hear myself. It's even worse when I'm up against someone who presents so much better than I do. So watch Paul Myers (I think that's how they spell his name) and me talk about Stuff at Bloggingheads.TV. The video is terrible (that's my fault; we should have recorded our own video and sent it to the editors, instead we recorded each other by way of an Australia-USA link that was routed, I fear, via Mongolia and Finland, using packets carried by mules). I'm out of sync. But it doesn't matter - it's voice with some moving pictures, that's…
edyong | May 24, 2008The prisoner was plucked from a free-living existence and plunged, without trial, into a cell from which it will never leave. It will be provided with food but will have to cater to the needs of its jailer, bereft of its own independence. And yet, this apparent injustice will go unchallenged. No liberal hackles will be raised and no bags of angry letters from Amnesty International will flood the oppressor's mailbox.
For this event did not occur in the world of autocrats and tyrants, but in that of a microscope slide. The captor measures less than a thirtieth of a millimetre across and its…
evolvingthoughts | May 23, 2008
One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a decision theorist.]
Language Log gives voice to the oft-repeated but (so far as I can tell, rarely supported) claim that humans are somehow smarter than other animals when children because they can hold a conversation. Still, they are right to be critical of journalistic tropes.
I nearly forgot to link to Kate Devitt's latest blog entry on memory. Here she discusses how…
edyong | May 22, 2008Our bodies are rife with genes and the majority of them aren't even ours. We all have a strong sense of our own individuality, but the truth is that our bodies are hotels for a diverse array of microbes including bacteria and fungi. The numbers are simultaneously creepy and humbling. Tot up all the cells in our bodies and the microbial ones would outnumber our own by a factor of ten. The five feet of our large intestine houses the majority of these microorganisms and contain up to 100 trillion of them.
These single-celled tenants are known as the microbiota and they carry their own sets of…
sa smith | May 21, 2008With a guest appearance by Eugenie! I didnt know she was there until I clicked on "Feeding and Gloating for More: The Challenge of the New Creationism, Jerry A. Coyne, The University of Chicago" (having a little trouble with a few minutes of that vid, but might just be me).
From RNA to Humans: A Symposium on Evolution
edyong | May 21, 2008
The era of genetic sequencing has revealed as much about the ties that bind us to other animals as the differences that set us apart. Often, comparing the genomes of different species shows that large changes in body size, shape and form are not mirrored by similar changes at a genetic level. New adaptations typically come about through small changes that redeploy existing genes to different ends, rather than raw innovation.
Snakes are an exception. A new study by Todd Castoe and Zhi Jiang at the University of Colorado has shown that the lifestyle of serpents is so unique that some…
hrynyshyn | May 21, 2008One in eight. Is that low enough? Not according to the authors of a new paper in PLoS Biology who conducted the "first nationally representative survey of teachers concerning the teaching of evolution." They did come up with some optimistic data, though. When asked to describe the role, or lack thereof, in human's development over the ages, 28% said it was solely evolution. That's more than twice the rate for the population at large (13%).
But overall, it still makes for depressing reading. Many of the teachers teaching biology don't have much instruction themselves in the subject. Those who…
mikethemadbiologist | May 20, 2008Make teachers take an evolutionary biology course in college. So say the authors of a recent PLoS Biology paper (italics mine):
The majority of teachers, however, see evolution as central and essential to high school biology courses. Yet the amount of time devoted to evolutionary biology varies substantially from teacher to teacher, and a majority either avoid human evolution altogether or devote only one or two class periods to the topic. We showed that some of these differences were due to personal beliefs about human origins. However, an equally important factor is the science education…
evolgen | May 20, 2008My advisor has recently got me listening to Whad'ya Know. My first reaction: It's like Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Only not as funny, not as interesting, and not as good. I've been downloading the podcasts for the past couple of weeks, and I'm not sure whether I'll keep subscribing in iTunes.
I'm only bringing this up because last week's episode contained a very egregious example of someone knowing just enough biology to get themselves in trouble. The sad part was that the person should have known better. Why? She teaches biology at the university level.
What happened? At the midpoint of the…
gregladen | May 20, 2008 Could even this bird be reanimated, gene by gene? When you are extinct you're extinct. Everything about you is dead and gone. There are no more of you, every individual in your species is kaput, non existent, used up, as the Pima Indians would say, you are hokum (like a car with a flat tire). In fact, you are hohokum (like a car with no tires). Your existence is erased. You are as blotto as a budgie in Burbank.
Indeed, every bit of your being, every gene in your genome, every base pair in your DNA, is no longer extant.
...
Or is it?
Well, scientists have recently taken a bit of…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2008
If scientists working in biology or a related field like psychology want to get attention, they will say something like this: Darwin was wrong, or made a mistake, or is insufficient to explain X, where X is whatever they are researching. It makes them seem to be proposing something important, because everybody agrees Darwin proposed something that changed our way of looking at life and ourselves. If we are saying he was wrong, a "paradigm shift" cannot be far behind...
So a paper entitled "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds" is a surefire…
clock | May 19, 2008
PLoS ONE just published a very exciting paper - a regulatory sequence from the genome of a preserved Tasmanian wolf was inserted into a mouse and shown to have the same function:
Resurrection of DNA Function In Vivo from an Extinct Genome:
There is a burgeoning repository of information available from ancient DNA that can be used to understand how genomes have evolved and to determine the genetic features that defined a particular species. To assess the functional consequences of changes to a genome, a variety of methods are needed to examine extinct DNA function. We isolated a…