evolution
evolvingthoughts | February 27, 2008
Chaim Potok, I think, once wrote that people either love the Jews too much or hate them too much. I hope I do neither, but I found this particular point of view by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman a brilliant example of why I don't want to demonise those who are religious but accept evolution and the rest of science:
Yes, Darwinian selection explains the species, physical laws decide planetary orbits, and human ingenuity brought the Bible into being. But religionists should view them all with Heschel’s “radical awe.” The fact that they occur is miracle enough; that natural law governs their…
gregladen | February 27, 2008Bennett Gordon has a post on the Har Mar Science Fair:
...Every diorama in the Home School Science Fair, which took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, had a biblical quote attached to it. A young woman whose project involved teaching her dog how to run circles between her legs decorated the words: "If you love me, you will obey what I command." (John 14:15) in pink lace fabric. This quote got to the crux of the science fair, in my opinion: parental commandment. These parents pulled their children out of school, away from their peers, and said, "Now prove that Darwin was…
awild | February 27, 2008
Meet Ectatomma tuberculatum. This tropical insect has the largest genome of 40 species of ants measured in a study by Neil Tsutsui et al in BioMed Central. Weighing in at 690 megabases, E. tuberculatum has nearly twice as much DNA as most other ant species, leading the authors to suggest that a whole genome duplication occurred somewhere in the line of Ectatommine ancestry.
Tsutsui et al's study, released today, is the first comprehensive genomic survey across ants. What's more, it is open access. You can read the whole thing here:
Evolution of Genome Size in Ants
Summary: Here, we…
loom | February 26, 2008The Encyclopedia of Life, about which I blogged and wrote about in the New York Times, has gone live earlier than previously scheduled. So go check it out. A few people have left comments here, and others are blogging too. I'm very curious to see what hard-core bioinformatics folks think as they take this baby out for a ride. Deepak Singh at business bytes genes molecules has some complaints, and Rod Page has a lot of them. It will take a little time to sort out these comments into the constructive criticisms and the outright dismissals. For example, I'm sure that it wouldn't take too long…
esiegel | February 26, 2008I was thinking about the timeline that brought us here, today, from the origin of the Universe up through the present day. I realized that the most uncertain thing that we know of, the step that we have the least information about, is the origin of life on Earth. All hypotheses about how life on Earth originated fall into three categories:
Abiogenesis, or the idea that life came from non-life, somehow, on Earth.
Life originated elsewhere in the Universe, and was brought to Earth, where it now thrives (e.g., panspermia, or exogenesis).
Life was created or designed by an outside force/being…
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2008
Welcome to this week's edition of Isms. In a couple of posts, Scibling Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript has given two quite distinct views of what biology is about: information, and mechanism. In the first he argues that what is needed to build organisms is information, and in the second that biology is about machines, things that do work. I want to say that he is wrong about the first and right about the second, and moreover that they are contradictory ways of looking at the living world.
I've argued against informational metaphysics when it comes to genes before (see here and here).…
gregladen | February 24, 2008We are busy watching Florida, and the ICR's new "degree" in "life science education" in Texas, and whatever crap is happening in our own back yards, and we may be missing a dramatic development at the K-12 level in Texas: Social conservatives are poised to take over the Texas State Board of Education.
There is a primary in on March 4th, in which Barney Maddox, a conservative creationist, may take over the run against incumbent Pat Hardy for the District 11 (Fort-Worth) seat on the school board. This would shift the balance of power in the Lone Star (read Libertarian Fundamentalist Yahoo)…
pharyngula | February 24, 2008The author of All-Too-Common Dissent has found a bizarre creationist on the web; this fellow, Randy Stimpson, isn't at all unusual, but he does represent well some common characteristics of creationists in general: arrogance, ignorance, and projection. He writes software, so he thinks we have to interpret the genome as a big program; he knows nothing about biology; and he thinks his expertise in an unrelated field means he knows better than biologists. And he freely admits it!
I am not a geneticist or a molecular biologist. In fact, I only know slightly more about DNA than the average college…
gregladen | February 23, 2008Regarding the topic of design and in particular design, as a term in evolutionary biology, see "The "design" mistake" at Evolving Thoughts.
grrlscientist | February 23, 2008tags: Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why it Matters, fossils, dinosaurs, creationism, Donald Prothero, book review
I was in love with dinosaurs when I was a kid, and I still am. It was my love for dinosaurs and fossils and especially my time spent learning the minutea of the evolutionary history of horses that quickly brought me into direct conflict with the church that I was being inculcated into when I was very young and innocent. Subsequently, I had to learn about evolution in small niblets on the sly. But I wish I had been able to read paleontologist Don Prothero's beautifully…
gregladen | February 23, 2008PZ Myers notes that Ken Miller is making a case for the term design in evolutionary biology. Miller simply claims that "design" comes from the usual, expected evolutionary processes (Natural Selection, etc.). PZ is not buying this bill of goods, and neither am I. One way to address this question might be to ask: "What would Darwin do?"
Darwin uses the word quite often in The Voyage (a text I'm closely examining these days) but with only one exception that I found (my search was not perfect) this is typically in connection with cultural things .... the design of a road, for instance. One…
grrlscientist | February 22, 2008tags: Charles Darwin, crabs, crustaceans, University of Oxford, Oxford Museum of Natural History, online database
Fiddler crabs are easily recognised by their distinctive asymmetric claws. This specimen was captured in May 1835 when the Beagle arrived in Mauritius.
Image: Oxford University Museum of Natural History [larger view].
The University of Oxford Museum of Natural History has electronically catalogued Charles Darwin's crabs that had been collected by the famous naturalist while he was making his voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836.
These crustaceans were…
gregladen | February 22, 2008In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of biogeography and evolution.
In the vicinity of Rio Tercero...
Hearing ... of the remains of one of the old giants, which a man told me he had seen on the banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the perpendicular…
awild | February 22, 2008
The smallest insect I've ever photographed made the cover of the scientific journal Genetics this week. Encarsia pergandiella, an aphelinid wasp not even a millimeter long, was the subject of a study by Perlmann, Kelly, and Hunter documenting the reproductive consequences of infection by bacterial parasite.
The wasp lab is downstairs from ours, so it wasn't much trouble to schlep my equipment over for an afternoon session. The goal was to create a set of images to submit to the journal as potential covers, and I was more than happy to have the opportunity to shoot these charismatic little…
clock | February 22, 2008I was lucky to be in the car at the right time this morning to catch a story about Mastodons in Manhattan: A Botanical Puzzle, i.e., why honey locust trees in NYCity have long thorns - an interesting story (click on the link and click on "Listen Now") which, among others, features our blog-friend Carl Buell.
evolvingthoughts | February 21, 2008
One of the more curious episodes in recent cultural history is the adoption, word for word, by Islamists particularly in Turkey of the American Christian fundamentalist antievolution schtick. Nobody knows more about this than Taner Edis, whose book An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam outlines how this came about and the relation between science and Islam (overall: not good).
Here's a nice short article by Edis, from the History of Science newsletter.
laelaps | February 21, 2008
Nebraska Man as restored in the Illustrated London News.
As I made my way around the lab table during my last human osteology practical, examining the yellowed and cracked teeth in the hopes that I'd be able to tell an upper molar from a lower one, I came across a particularly strange tooth. I had been told by the professor that 3rd molars ("wisdom teeth") can be strange and don't always conform to the rules that makes identifying other molars comparatively easy, but this specimen was simply bizarre. The arrangement of cusps and folds on the crown of the tooth didn't correspond to any of…
neurotopia | February 21, 2008They put on a fantastic Darwin Day celebration in Iowa City. Excellent camaraderie, good times good people good beer and whatnot, and the turnout for all the events was exceptional.
Massimo Pigliucci gave a nice interview for the local NPR station which you can find here.
Darwin Day with evolutionary biologist
Massimo Pigliucci
In an event co-sponsored the University of Iowa Department of Biological Sciences to celebrate Darwin Day in Iowa City featuring renowned evolutionary biologist, philosopher, and professor at SUNY Stonybrook, Dr Massimo Pigliucci. His book Denying Evolution has…
gregladen | February 21, 2008Plan B is, of course, inserting Christian Creationism into the Social Studies curriculum. This is disconcerting. Many otherwise perfectly rational and intelligent people think this is a good idea. It is not.
This sort of proposal is becoming more common now (this week) in editorials and other opinion outlets, with the defeat of the Wedge Strategy to water down the science standards in Florida. (This rebound effect occurs every time creationists are defeated.)
So, why is this not a good idea?
Social studies is a broad field of investigation that has many important goals. Like modern…