evolution
voltagegate | March 21, 2008There's a neat study being published today in Science discussing the reproductive potential of ecological systems 570 mya. The findings are based on the new discovery of a "tube-like" organism (so say the PRs) called Funisia dorothea, which apparently was able to reproduce sexually and lived in a complex ecosystem despite the apparent absence of predation. The researchers have taken this to be an example of a much more complex world during the Neoproterozoic and periods before. From the PR:
...in describing the ecology and reproductive strategies of Funisia dorothea, a tubular organism…
gregladen | March 21, 2008This is unbelievable!!!! I am outraged yet not surprised. I am incensed yet entertained. I am frightened yet ever determined to cast off the yoke of oppression. And so on.
You MUST GO HERE NOW and READ THIS. You will laugh, you will cry, you will punch a fist through the wall, and you will never look at a police officer, a movie theater, or a creationist in the same way again. Ever.
laelaps | March 20, 2008According to tradition, Richard Owen is the great "villain" of Victorian biology; brilliant, arrogant, and jealous, the "British Cuvier" was the greatest threat to On the Origin of Species. In turn, his arch-nemesis was T.H. Huxley, a heroic young scientist who zealously defended Darwin and successfully made a fool of the creationist Owen. So goes the common treatment, anyway, and like most other quick-and-dirty historical synopses the popular caricatures of both Owen and Huxley present a rather jaundiced view of each figure and their importance to science. Much like Charles Lyell…
mikethemadbiologist | March 20, 2008OK, last post about this bozo, and then I'm done (famous last words...). In the previous post, I dealt with Egnor's claim that the evolution of antibiotic resistance by selection of resistant genotypes is obvious, and not germane (namely, that it wasn't obvious at one point in time). What bothered me with not just Egnor's claim (which I'll get to a minute) and ScienceBlogling Mike's response is that evolutionary biology does have a significant role to play in combating the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance.
First, what Egnor said:
The important medical research on antibiotic…
pharyngula | March 20, 2008
The Harvard multimedia team that put together that pretty video of the Inner Life of the Cell has a whole collection of videos online (including Inner Life with a good narration.) Go watch the one titled F1-F0 ATPase; it's a beautiful example of a highly efficient molecular motor, and it's the kind of thing the creationists go ga-ga over. It's complex, and it does the same rotary motion that the bacterial flagellum does; it has a little turbine in the membrane, a stream of protons drives rotation of an axle, and the movement of that axle drives conformation changes in the surrounding protein…
gregladen | March 19, 2008The fight continues in Texas; Homophobia is a punishable offense, yet legislators march on in opposition to the already underway 21st century; Some guy named Stephen on homeschooling.
Mary Helen Berlanga is the senior member of the Texas Board of Education. She is warning Texas citizens of impending fights on the board regarding a number of issues, including evolution.
She asked her constituents to travel to Austin next week to speak out against proposed amendments outside consultants are pushing for that she says exclude Hispanics and other minorities from classroom instruction.…
pharyngula | March 19, 2008
Fossils are cool, but some of us are interested in processes and structures that don't fossilize well. For instance, if you want to know more about the evolution of mammalian reproduction, you'd best not pin your hopes on the discovery of a series of fossilized placentas, or fossilized mammary glands … and although a few fossilized invertebrate embryos have been discovered, their preservation relied on conditions not found inside the rotting gut cavity of dead pregnant mammals.
You'd think this would mean we're right out of luck, but as it turns out, we have a place to turn to, a different…
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2008In the previous post, I described how Egnor, like many creationists, refuses to answer serious rebuttals of his foolishness. But what's truly odd is how Egnor argues about natural selection.
Egnor repeatedly claims that 'Darwinism' is nothing except self-obvious: bacteria that are more likely to survive and reproduce because they are resistant to an antibiotic are more likely to survive and reproduce in the presence of that antibiotic.
It is obvious--today. If I were to give a talk which had as its central thesis the concept that natural selection has given rise to antibiotic resistant…
pharyngula | March 18, 2008
You know how people can be going along, minding their own business, and then they see some cute big-eyed puppy and they go "Awwwww," and their hearts melt, and then it's all a big sloppy mushfest? I felt that way the other day, as I was meandering down some obscure byways of the developmental biology literature, and discovered the dicyemid mesozoa … an obscure phylum which I vaguely recall hearing about before, but had never seriously examined. After reading a few papers, I have to say that these creatures are much more lovable then mere puppy dogs. Look at this and say "Awwwww!"
Light…
razib | March 18, 2008John Hawks responds to the new paper in PNAS, Close correspondence between quantitative and molecular-genetic divergence times for Neandertals and modern humans.
mikethemadbiologist | March 18, 2008While criticizing someone who does not understand the difference between artificial and natural selection--something I've successfully communicated to high school students and undergraduates--is like picking on the slow kid, his repeated nitpicking of ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford's post about the topic is illustrative of how creationists, whether they be young earth or intelligent design, operate.
Instead of dealing with Orac's or my response, Egnor quibbles with Mike over exactly what he meant. It's trolling, masquerading as intellectual discussion (and I had the same style of idiocy show…
laelaps | March 18, 2008The Cambrian "explosion," the enigmatic phenomenon in which many of the phyla existing on the planet appeared in a relatively short period of time (at least 20 million years), remains a difficult event to study. Fossils are rare, intricate, and often represent creatures that are difficult to fit into one group or another. There are fossils of earlier creatures (and there may have even been an earlier, Ediacaran "explosion"), but at present it is the Cambrian event that is the most famous radiation of diverse forms of life. A relatively recent paper published in the Annual Review of Earth and…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
The ever-interesting blog of Moselio Schachter, Small Things Considered has another post of thought-provoking microbes: hyperthermophiles. These wee beasties live at 90°;C in anoxic conditions. I particularly liked the passing comment:
Growth and division of these organisms was observed at 90°;C under anoxic conditions using a dark-field light microscope (which takes quite a set-up).
Um yes. I'm betting that was a Herculean effort! In particular this is interesting because there is a bias in identifying microbes that do not culture in ordinary lab conditions. These researchers are to be…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
So, here I am in Phoenix airport, waiting to go back home, and I read T Ryan Gregory's snark about me and barcoding. Apparently I am to learn only from his blog posts and not from (perish the thought) critics. One should never attend to critics. My crime was, of course, to say that I thought Brent Mishler of UC Berkeley and others (including mein host in Phoenix, Quentin Wheeler, and Kip Will) were correct in their concerns that barcoding was being touted as a replacement for proper taxonomy and that it will draw resources from it.
What are the issues?
There are three, as I see it.
One…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
Ever since Gould's Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the popular view has been that the Cambrian was an "explosion" of living forms, and for some, usually but not always creationists, this has been touted as contrary to "Darwinism" (whateverthehell that is) or even evolutionary theory. PvM at Panda's Thumb has a nice post about this and recent work. And I'm not just saying that because he links to one of my articles on the web. One point I would make, that he doesn't mention, is that figures derived from "genera" or "classes" in the fossil record are weak signals…
mikethemadbiologist | March 17, 2008Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, in an excellent post, argues that much of the opposition to evolution stems from opposition to (mis)perceived liberal elites (bold original; italics mine):
What scientists tend to underestimate is the extent to which many people react viscerally against science just because it is science. Or, more generally, because it is seen as part of an effort on the part of elites to force their worldview on folks who are getting along just fine without all these fancy ideas, thank you very much.
In the old-time (1980's) controversies about teaching creationism in…
hrynyshyn | March 17, 2008Shortly before taking his last breath, the late William F. Buckley heaped praise on The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, a new book by mathematician and intelligent-design evangelist David Berlinksi. This will likely encourage certain segments of the population to buy Berklinski's book, which is a shame.
The rest of us can take advantage of a cheaper alternative, and scan the first item in the April 2008 Harper's magazine Readings section. The excerpt from the book reminds those of us who fear a return to the Dark Ages of just what it is we're battling.
To the…
gregladen | March 17, 2008First, Larry said:
...the right people hate Idiots...Wells makes a virtue out of lying for Jesus...He should be an embarrassment to the intelligent design creationist cult except that the members of that cult are all incapable of separating fact from fiction when it comes to science...When I first saw the Wells article I seriously wondered whether Jonathan Wells was mentally stable...
Then, Michael Egnor said:
Dr. Moran has a low view of people who question his evolutionary views from the perspective of design.
Larry had previously said:
Flunk the IDiots...40% of the freshman class [at UCSD…
oracknows | March 17, 2008One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research uses mice to study breast cancer and neurologic disease while she and her husband were having a birthday party for one of their children and assaulted her husband, who had gone to the front of the house to confront them. This unrelenting attack on the use…