evolution
gregladen | February 16, 2008Certain Bloggers have been giving Floridians a hard time because of the opposition to teaching science in public science classrooms. Shame on those bloggers. (See here and here for examples). There are some local school districts in Florida that insist that excellent science, and not creationism or religion of any kind, be taught in public schools.
The Volusia School Board supports teaching of evolution. Here i what some of the school board members say about this issue:
School Board Chairwoman Judy Conte: "The home is a good place to teach religion, I think." .. don't "confuse the two…
gregladen | February 15, 2008Evolution: The Mind's Big Bang
I've known Shea for years ... since before grad school. Going out drinking with this guy was a little dangerous. Almost as dangerous as going out drinking with me.
laelaps | February 15, 2008When I wrote about the new species of predatory dinosaur, Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis, this past December, I made a note of how interesting it was that in Cretaceous Gondwana there seems to be a certain triumvirate of predatory dinosaur groups. According to the data presented in Brusatte and Sereno (2007), remains of spinosaurids, carcharodontosaurids, and abelisauroids have been found near each other in various locations in a range of Cretaceous-aged strata on the African continent, perhaps reflecting a guild structure like that of extant mammalian African carnivores.
Approximately 95…
zooillogix | February 15, 2008For years debate has raged amongst bat researchers as to whether or not bats were really just "flying rodents..." <--(NOT TRUE). At age 6 Ben was in the World of Darkness at the Bronx Zoo when he heard a mother tell her young children this totally incorrect animal fact. As bats were his favorite animal, he became angry and marched up to the mother and informed her that she was totally wrong, told her to "read the signs if she didn't know the facts" and then filled her in on a few million years of evolutionary history <--(TRUE). In fact many scientists believe that fruit bats, may…
gregladen | February 15, 2008A survey conducted by the St. Petersburg Times shows that half of the respondents want "only faith-based theories such as creationism or intelligent design" taught in public school classrooms, and only 22 percent want evolution-only life science curriculum.
The Florida State Board of Education will decide next Tuesday to adopt ... or not ... new standards that would make a subtle but important change in the wording of life science standards. The change would place evolutionary biology (also known as "evolutionary theory") clearly at the center of the life science curriculum.
The survey…
gregladen | February 15, 2008Darwin published hundreds of pages of text, but he also kept notebooks many of which come down to us today. They can be roughly divided into two aspects, the Beagle field notebooks of 1831 - 1836, and his later notes. Sometimes these notes are found in a single book, and one way they are told apart (when otherwise undated) is by the orientation of the notes themselves. Darwin wrote "portrait" style in the field, but "landscape" style in the lab.
repost from gregladen.com
Many of the notebooks are preserved at Down House, Darwin's residence. Down House has 14 Beagle notebooks, one…
razib | February 14, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And so with the completion of the 7th chapter the first half, book I of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, ends. From this point on we shift from history of science to science proper. At over 1,300 pages of narrative prose (add index, bibliography, etc., and it weighs in at nearly 1,450 pages) this is a multi-course meal. But judging from the initial comments when I began my trek through this undiscovered Gouldian land the author started with some rather unappetizing starters which suppressed rather than whetted the eagerness of many for future…
gregladen | February 14, 2008
Darwin's finches are a classic and historically important example of a species radiation (sometimes called an "adaptive" radiation, but that implies a specific assertion about the cause of the radiation which may not be appropriate in all cases). During the five weeks that Darwin spent on the Galapagos in September, 1835, he made a number of observations of these birds, but they did not occupy his time or attention more than any other aspect of this remarkable archipelago of islands. It seems that Darwin did not recognize all of the finches as finches, thinking some were of an entirely…
neurotopia | February 14, 2008If you're looking for a website that gives a nice intro to the nature of science and evolution, but doesn't use lots of jargon, you should check out This View of Life. From the About page:
The aim of this project is to present the topic of evolution in a scientifically accurate manner that avoids technical language, but that also avoids potentially misleading colloquial language. It strives to be accessible to the non-scientist and so it represents a general outline, merely scratching the surface of the large body of research in the many facets of this topic. For more detailed information,…
gregladen | February 14, 2008On Wednesday the Bay District School Board voted to sign a resolution saying it does not agree with the proposed science standards as they are currently written.
The new proposed standards adjust language for life science that would move Florida schools into modern, 21st century thinking regarding the role of evolution (as central) in life science. The Bay District School Board has rejected this modernization, opting instead to allow the teaching of creationism along side evolution in public schools. This decision, if enacted, would be a violation of well established case law. If the Bay…
razib | February 13, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
Chapter 6 of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory was short. Yes, you read that right, this was a short chapter! It was only 38 pages, but it was also one of the most readable and fast paced. Additionally, Stephen Jay Gould told me things I didn't know beforehand. Partly this has to be a function of the fact that because he focused on geology I was just ignorant, though his revisionism of 19th century Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism seemed well done to me. But, as I said, this is the chapter where my own knowledge has been the thinnest so far,…
grrlscientist | February 13, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, bird-dinosaur split, dinosaurs, birds, rocks-versus-clocks, fossil record, molecular clocks
The first feathered dinosaur fossil found in China -- Sinosauropteryx.
The feathers can be seen in the dark line running along the specimen's back.
Image: Mick Ellison, AMNH [larger view]
There is a lot of controversy among scientists regarding when modern birds first appeared. The current fossil record suggests that modern birds appeared approximately 60-65 million years ago when the other lineages of dinosaurs (along with at least half of all terrestrial…
gregladen | February 13, 2008What would happen if the Discovery Institute view of Darwinism was True:
Hat Tip: War on Error
gregladen | February 13, 2008Eventually, the Beagle headed south to the area of Uruguay and Argentina, still on the Atlantic Coast, where extensive mapping of the coastal waters was required.
The Parana and Uruguay Rivers meet in the Atlantic estuary known as Rio de la Plata. On the north side of this huge body of water is Montevideo, Uruguay, and on the south side, the northern coast of Argentina. There is an interesting story linked with early European exploration of this area. A Spanish ship is the first known European craft to explore La Plata. The ship's captain and a small crew went inland, and never came…
laelaps | February 13, 2008
"It is little wonder, then, why this great creature failed to continue its lineage: with no ears, it could not sustain a top hat upon its head, and thereby expired from lack of common dignity." A cartoon featuring Koch's "Hydrarchos," cobbled together from several Basilosaurus skeletons. [Update: I've been told that this cartoon is from Married to the Sea, whereas I had assumed that it was so old that it was public domain (I just had it sitting around in my pictures file and I don't remember where it came from). I'll err on the side of caution: Married to the Sea.]
Yesterday was the…
loom | February 13, 2008 I guess it's only appropriate that the week of Darwin's birthday is seeing a bunch of new reports about evolutionary transitions. On Monday there was news about how ancient whales with teeth turned into whales with baleen--thanks to the discovery of a fossil of an ancient whale that appears to have had both teeth and baleen. Today's news takes us from the sea to the trees--the fossil of a primitive bat. The transition that the ancestors of bats made from scampering shrew-like mammals to masterful flyers has remained particularly mysterious. Today's new fossil lets us look back further than…
evolvingthoughts | February 13, 2008
Biology does normativity all the time. There are things that are the "normal" type of state of a species, an organism, an ecosystem, and so on, and things that are abnormal. But the puzzling thing is that all philosophers know, since David Hume, that normativity doesn't develop out of facts. So no amount of factual statements about species, organisms and ecosystems will give a definition of what is normal.
A suitably abstract introduction to the Seed Masters' Imperative: "Tell us what a disease is", right? Hey, I'm a philosopher. What did you expect?
One of the normative words of…
clock | February 13, 2008Karl Mogel interviews Neil Shubin. Paleontology makes testable predictions, with cool results.
razib | February 12, 2008Last week I reviewed some seminal early papers of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton. Hamilton was arguably the most accomplished theoretical biologist of the second half of the 20th century; Richard Dawkins referred to him as the most "...distinguished Darwinian since Darwin." My review of the papers I selected from Narrow Roads of Gene Land I allowed me to reacquaint myself with his prose style after a few years away, and as it came on the heals of my reviews of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory I could not help but note contrasts.
On occasion Hamilton veers into such…