evolution
gregladen | January 28, 2008The Twin Cities Creation Science Association Home School Science Fair, held each year in February, in Har Mar Mall, Roseville, Minnesota, will occur this year on Saturday & Sunday, February 16 and 17, 2008.
The Application Deadline is January 31st, 2008 ($5.00 entry fee)
You can register after January 31st at the door for only three bucks more!
Here are the entry guidelines:
This fair is open to all Home School students in the greater Twin Cities area.
Each student may enter only one project.
There will be only individual projects, and team projects will not be allowed.
Each exhibit…
gregladen | January 27, 2008This is my reply to a post by Coturnix called The Hopeless Monster? Not so fast!
First, the phylogeny of the discussion.
Olivia Judson wrote this:
The Monster Is Back, and It's Hopeful
Which was responded to here:
Hopeless Monsters--A Guest Post from Dr. Jerry Coyne
That dyad of posts was passed around by Carl Zimmer, who asked for commentary. This is the set of posts of which I'm aware that resulted:
Why wither Goldschmidt?
Nature makes no leaps...
Jerry Coyne smacks down Olivia Judson
Coyne is on the Loom
Macromutations and Punctuated Equilibria
Hopeful Monsters and Hopeful Models
Then…
gregladen | January 27, 2008"Eventually, I came up with a name for it. I called it 'irreducible complexity'"
gregladen | January 27, 2008"Counterknowledge," I would have thought, includes things like how a particular customer likes her eggs, or if another customer gets antsy if he does not get his refill right way. You know, like in a diner. Counter knowledge. But it turns out that Counterknowledge is stuff like creationism, creation science, Scientology, alternative medicine, and so on.
The Telegraph has a review of a book by Damian Thompson with the title "Counterknowledge."
A synopsis from the publisher:
We are being swamped by dangerous nonsense. From 9/11 conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial, creationism to…
gregladen | January 27, 2008The loss of sight in cave dwelling species is widely known. We presume that since sight in utter darkness has no fitness value, the mutation of a gene critical to the development of the sense of sight is not selected against. Over time, any population living in darkness will eventually experience experience such mutations, and these mutations can reach fixation.
Astyanax mexicanus: Top is the surface, sighted form, bottom is the cave-dwelling, blind form. From the Jeffery Lab.Beyond this, we may hypothesize that a mutation "turning off" sight could be beneficial. By definition, an…
gregladen | January 26, 2008"Twelve mentions of Charles Darwin in a 1,400 page textbook..."
Previous in the series
clock | January 26, 2008Olivia Judson wrote a blog post on her NYTimes blog that has many people rattled. Why? Because she used the term "Hopeful Monster" and this term makes many biologists go berserk, foaming at the mouth. And they will not, with their eye-sight fogged by rage, notice her disclaimer:
Note, however, that few modern biologists use the term. Instead, most people speak of large morphological changes due to mutations acting on single genes that influence embryonic development.
So, was Olivia Judson right or wrong in her article? Both. Essentially she is correct, but she picked some bad examples,…
gregladen | January 26, 2008This is a repost of an item from my old blog.
The Twin Cities Creation Science Fair association usually posts "random" photographs of the children's exhibits on their web site after the fair is over. You can go and see them for the last few years. (Don't look for a place to click on this post, I don't provide it here.)
But this year, something different happened, and if you go to the site where the photographs are supposed to be posted, you get this:
Interesting, huh?
Now, to really get the context of this, you may need to read at least the blog post and the last six or so comments in…
gregladen | January 26, 2008This is a repost of an item from my old blog.
The Twin Cities Home Schooling Creationist Science Fair at Har Mar Mall in Roseville, Minnesota happened last month. The organization that (at least partly) sponsors this event (Twin Cities Creation Science) usually posts photographs of the science fair, but this year they got into a tizzy about it for some reason and removed the photographs from their web site.
I was at the science fair, and I snapped a couple of photos, and I think there are interesting points of discussion that are lost with the TCCSA dropping the ball. Unfortunately, many…
gregladen | January 26, 2008This is a repost of an item from my old blog.
The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge.
Proverbs 1:7
This is an Absodoodly-don't miss event!
Har Mar Mall, Rosedale District
Roseville Minnesota
Feb 17 and 18 2007
Exhibits must be set up between 8:30 and 10:00 am Saturday and will remain up until 4:00 pm Sunday
Judging begins at 10:00 am and finishes at about 12:30 pm Saturday
According to Russ McGlenn (the dapper gentlemen in the photo, shown here at the Har Mar Mall during a previous Creation Science Fair), of Adventure Safaris (facilitator and coordinating agency of the Home…
evolvingthoughts | January 25, 2008
Reacting to Jerry Coyne's guest blog on The Loom, Brian Switek at Laelaps discusses, among other things, the objection to Darwin's theories that Huxley put forward, both in personal correspondence and in print:
The only objections that have occurred to me are 1st that you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting 'Natura non facit saltum' so unreservedly. I believe she does make small jumps--and 2nd. it is not clear to me why if external physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose variation should occur at all--
Darwin indeed used that phrase, which…
gregladen | January 25, 2008"This is the story of a battle between faith and knowledge..."
The first in a series from the BBC
Next in the series
gregladen | January 25, 2008
Did humans wipe out the Pleistocene megafauna? This is a question that can be asked separately for each area of the world colonized by Homo sapiens. It is also a question that engenders sometimes heated debate. A new paper coming out in the Journal of Human Evolution concludes that many Pleistocene megafauna managed to go extinct by themselves, but that humans were not entirely uninvolved.
The paper by Pushkina and Raia ("Human influence on distribution and extinctions of the late Pleistocene Eurasian megafauna") examines sources in the literature and a number of databases for Eurasian…
jlynch | January 25, 2008By way of GrrlScientist, I notice that Fieldiana (the journal of the Field Museum is now freely available online. This means that DD Davis’ classic study "The giant panda: a morphological study of evolutionary mechanisms" of 1964 can now be enjoyed by one and all. Over three hundred pages, detailing everything you’d want to know about giant panda morphology.
laelaps | January 25, 2008On November 23rd, 1858, T.H. Huxley wrote one of the most famous letters in the history of science to Charles Darwin. While the letter is perhaps most widely known for Huxley's staunch support of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection against the opposition both were sure would come out against the book (Huxley opining that "I am sharpening up my claws & beak in readiness."), the letter also contains another important quote. As much as Huxley was taken with Darwin's book, he did have some reservations about one aspect of Darwin's idea that came up over and over again;
The only…
pharyngula | January 25, 2008
OK, it's cute and catchy, but it's also got a very awkward sudden jump from the mammal-like reptiles to the primates, and unfortunately it perpetuates the "evolution as a process on rails" concept by showing a single lineage — ours, of course. Why not show a progression to a modern rose, or a fly, or a fish? Or better yet, illustrate evolution as an ongoing explosion of diversity? I know, I know, it isn't as engrossing to self-centered humans, the market for this sort of thing.
gregladen | January 25, 2008Remember this post on chimpanzee food sharing? Over a PLoS, where the original paper is published, you can get involved in a discussion of the paper. I posted something over there in response to someone else'
Go have a look, here.
Access to the discussion is on the right side bar.
esiegel | January 24, 2008Evolution, creationism, and intelligent design are words that many people have extremely strong opinions about. Regardless of how you feel about why the laws of nature are what they are, which have evidently allowed us to exist, the evidence for the validity of the theory of evolution with one major mechanism being natural selection is absolutely overwhelming. That said, this is often very hard to communicate to people, especially those with strong biases against what they perceive as the implications of evolution, how evolution works, and why the case for it is so compelling.
Thankfully,…