evolution
grrlscientist | February 12, 2008tags: Darwin, Darwin's Birthday, images
The Definitive Darwin.
Image: The Nonist.
A century and a half after Darwin's most important work was published, people still seem to have a hard time wrapping their minds around its implications, or are made nervous and upset by them. The authors at The Nonist thought it was high time that Darwin's image was updated and his ideas put into less technical terms which everyone can understand. With that in mind they modified Bob Peak's poster for Every Which Way But Loose, creating an image better fit to reach the doubtful American public.
gregladen | February 12, 2008One of the most compelling argument that the story of Noah's Ark is made up is the implausibility of having animals like tigers and lions together with animals like lambs and deer on the same boat for very long. The big carnivores would eventually eat the little cute furry things. The bunnies would be the first to go. But new evidence, shown on the Miracle Pet Show disproves this objection.
So, if it is god's will, or if people just darn try hard enough, anybody and anything can get along with anything and anybody. Put that on an inspirational poster and hang it, I say!
Or is there…
gregladen | February 12, 2008"Disease" is a big word. I'd like to address this question by focusing on the difference, or lack of difference, between a poison, a disease, and a yummy thing to eat. It turns out that they may all be the same. Yet different.
Phenylketonuria (fee-null-keet-o-noo-ria), mercifully also known as "PKU" (pee - kay - you) is a disorder in which the amino acid phenylalanine is not broken down by an enzyme (phenylalanine hydroxylase) and thus accumulates in the body as phenylpyruvic acid.
This is bad because phenylpyruvic acid interferes with normal development of neural tissues.
In western…
tfk | February 12, 2008
199 years ago, in a log cabin in Kentucky, a boy was born to a pair of farmers on the American frontier. His parents named him Abraham, after the father prepared to sacrifice his own divinely promised son when called to do so by his God, and who, the Apostle Paul said, "against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations."
Abraham's first son, Isaac, is said to be the direct ancestor of all Jewish peoples, while his son Ishmael claimed as the scion of the Arabs, including Muhammad the founder of Islam. These lines of descent are woven through centuries of…
razib | February 11, 2008Dienekes points me to a provisional open access paper, Analysis of genetic variation in Ashkenazi Jews by high density SNP genotyping. Here's the conclusion:
There were small but significant differences in measures of genetic diversity between
AJ [Ashkenazi Jewish] and CEU [Utah whites from the HapMap sample]. Analysis of genome-wide LD structure revealed a greater number of haplotype blocks which tended to be smaller in AJ. There was essentially no difference in global LD decay between AJ and CEU, although there was a tendency for faster decay of nearby SNPs and slower decay of intermediate…
jrosenhouse | February 11, 2008The Guardian series also contains this article from theology professor Richard Harries, arguing -- surprise! -- that evolution and Christian faith are compatible. Let's have a look.
Here's paragraph two:
As the Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley put it, God does not just make the world, he does something much more wonderful, he makes the world make itself. More generally, the scientist Asa Gray, a close friend of Darwin, said that there had been no undue reluctance amongst Christians in accepting Darwin's theory. So how it is that some people still think the church was opposed to evolution…
jrosenhouse | February 11, 2008In other news, the Guardian newspaper has posted a series of articles about various evolution related topics.
First up is this characteristically lucid entry from Richard Dawkins. I especially like this:
But what makes natural selection so special? A powerful idea assumes little to explain much. It does lots of explanatory "heavy lifting", while expending little in the way of assumptions or postulations. It gives you plenty of bangs for your explanatory buck. Its Explanation Ratio - what it explains, divided by what it needs to assume in order to do the explaining - is large.
If any reader…
mikethemadbiologist | February 11, 2008I really wasn't going to bash Kristof over his recent apologia for evangelicals. I've done so before, and I didn't really see the point in doing so again. But, by way of ScienceBlogling James Hrynyshyn, I came across Kristof's response to some of the criticism he has received (in bold is his synopsis of a particular criticism; italics mine):
It's okay to deride evangelicals because they're Neanderthals on science and other issues. If people don't believe in evolution, they invite mockery. If we call them nuts, it's because we have good evidence that they are nuts.
I agree that the…
loom | February 11, 2008It's time to add a new chapter to the Whale Chronicles....
...more below the fold...
Evidence from both DNA and fossils agree that whales evolved from hoofed mammals on land. At first they may have been occasional swimmers, only later evolving into meat-eaters hunting for prey in the water. Between about 50 and 40 million years ago, they became increasingly adapted to the sea. Paleontologists have found fossils of dozens of species of early whales documenting this transition.
Most of those lineages of early whales became extinct. Living whales belong to only two lineages that emerged about…
razib | February 11, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And now there have been 5. Through 5 chapters of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Stupidly I only realized that Stephen Jay Gould wrote two books which he had insisted be bound together. The table of contents which I was familiar with turned out to be the "Expanded Contents." The Contents proper give a better lay of the land:
Chapter 1:
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 1
Part I, Chapters 2-7
The history of Darwinian Logic and Debate 91
Segue to Part II 585
Part II, Chapters 8-12
Towards a Revised and…
laelaps | February 11, 2008
Given that tomorrow is Darwin Day, I've been trying to think of something original to write that will not merely be an echo of what my fellow bloggers have already written about Charles Darwin. Unfortunately, I have to brave the cold to attend classes for the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening, but I thought I would post something to illustrate just how much Darwin's perspective of natural history changed between the time he traveled the world on the Beagle to the time he published On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Writing in his diary during the Beagle voyage (…
razib | February 10, 2008I've finished the 5th chapter of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, but I don't have time to put up a review right now. But I do want to comment on a funny passage:
I ran into Ernst Mayr as I was completing this chapter and asked if he had ever met de Vries. "No," he said, "botanists and zoologists didn't talk to each other very much in those days, and anyway, I was a Lamarckian then."
Ernst Mayr lived from 1904 to 2005. Hugo de Vries didn't die until 1935. So a meeting is certainly plausible; and it reiterates just how long Mayr lived that it is plausible he knew one of the founders…
gregladen | February 10, 2008
Michael Behe made a guest appearance in Beaver County the other day to engage in a debate on intelligent Design vs. Real Science. He got interviewed by a local reporter, who posed questions to both Behe and his antagonist. Here I provide a few excerpts for your amusement.
First, you may be wondering where Beaver County is. The Beaver County Times Online, like most local newspaper, does not mention where it is. Do you know how much time we bloggers have to spend figuring out where these dumbass local stories come from? You have to use odd clues and make guesses. For instance, the…
gregladen | February 10, 2008The provocative title of this post is the title of a new book, by Ken Ham (founder of the absurd Creation Museum, in the woeful state of Kentucky) . Charles ware is co-author.
The book came out in November, 2007, but is receiving beefed up publicity, presumably to coincide with Darwin Month and Darwin's upcoming birthday.
This is a little like publicizing a book denying that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Lincoln's Birthday (which, by the way, is the same as Darwin's Birthday).
This issue has been addressed before, but since the publishers of the book have chosen to…
gregladen | February 10, 2008When reading The Voyage it is impossible to miss the observation that much of the time Darwin was engaged in adolescent boy behavior: Pulling the heads off insects, noting how long they would wiggle after cut in half, closely examining the ooze and guts, occupied much of his time. Obviously, careful observation and a strong stomach were not all that was required to think up Natural Selection and his other theories, or the Origin of Species would have been written dozens of times by dozens of grown up kids.
In the following passages, Darwin is still along the Atlantic Coast, in "The…
gregladen | February 10, 2008A very important and truly wonderful paper in Nature described a tour-de-force analysis of the Mammalian Evolutionary Record, and draws the following two important conclusions:
The diversification of the major groups of mammals occurred millions of years prior to the KT boundary event; and
The further diversification of these groups into the modern pattern of mammalian diversity occurred millions of years later than the KT boundary event.
[This is a repost from gregladen.com]
The KT boundary event is the moment in time when a ca. 10 km. diameter object going very fast hit the earth in the…
evolvingthoughts | February 9, 2008
So, it's Darwin Day tomorrow my time. So what? What's so great about Darwin?
I mean, Darwin did some very cool science, and often was remarkably perceptive about the nature of biology, but he's not the only one in his day. In fact, he was beaten by a great many people on various notions like the Tree of Life (Heinrich Bronn), Natural Selection (Patrick Matthew, and possibly Alfred Wallace), universal common ancestry (his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin), transmutation (Pierre Maupertuis, Lamarck) the struggle for existence (de Candolle), division of labour (Adam Smith, of course),…
gregladen | February 9, 2008I've not been commenting on the comments on this post about the Myers - Rue debate, but I have been reading them with great interest. The following, while not addressing most of the comments, arises from them.
In this post, I mentioned Loyal Rue's linear hierarchy of ... I'm not sure what he called it ... let's say certainty (in science). It ran something like this:
Facts
Laws
Theory
Hypothesis
Conjecture
Speculation
Absurdity
This is not exactly what he use, but close. Perhaps conjecture and speculation were reversed... but you get the idea. You think of something that might be true (…