evolution
pharyngula | January 9, 2008This is the time — you can give feedback on the Minnesota science standards, and you can also apply to be on the standards writing committee. Here's where you have a chance to make a difference.
The Minnesota Department of Education is now soliciting feedback from the public on the current Science Standards via an online survey. The survey will be open until February 21, 2008.
First, review the current Science Standards on the Science Standards Web page.
Then take the Science Standards online survey.
Applications are also being accepted for individuals interested in serving on the Science…
mikethemadbiologist | January 9, 2008Francisco Ayala in the most recent edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science makes a good distinction between religion and science (italics mine):
Science and religion concern different aspects of the human experience. Scientific explanations are based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world and rely exclusively on natural processes to account for natural phenomena. Scientific explanations are subject to empirical tests by means of observation and experimentation and are subject to the possibility of modification and rejection. Religious faith, in contrast, does…
gregladen | January 9, 2008A glow in the dark pig has given birth to more glow in the dark pigs.
Fluorescent Chinese pig passes on trait to offspring from PhysOrg.com
A pig genetically modified in China to make it glow has given birth to fluorescent piglets, proving such changes can be inherited, state media said Wednesday.
[...]
The pigs were originally modified (to glow) using somatic cell nuclear transfer.It is not entirely clear to me how the gene got into the gametes. It also appears that the distribution of the gene in the offspring is not exactly the same as in the parent, suggesting something interesting…
evolvingthoughts | January 8, 2008
Some things I spotted today..
It's Alfred Russel Wallace's birthday. Mike Dunford has a post card. I always think that if Wallace had recognised that selection is not all about survival, he could have come up with an account of social selection causing big brains (the so-called Machiavelli hypothesis) instead of Spirit.
The Environmental Action blog is calling for the resignation of the head of the EPA for refusing to allow California to regulate emissions. See also Effect Measure.
Two really good Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles have been just published:
Animal Cognition…
gregladen | January 7, 2008A group of scientists ... has uncovered a new biological mechanism that could provide a clearer window into a cell's inner workings.....What's more, this mechanism could represent an "epigenetic" pathway -- a route that bypasses an organism's normal DNA genetic program -- for so-called Lamarckian evolution, enabling an organism to pass on to its offspring characteristics acquired during its lifetime to improve their chances for survival.
Giardia surfaces are known to adapt to a host's immune response, and pass this on to daughter cells during cell division. That would be a system of…
pharyngula | January 7, 2008I know most of you have already read it with your print subscription to Seed, but I'll mention it anyway: my last column can now be read on the web. This one is all about the weird, accidental, clumsy way segmentation patterns in flies are set up.
evolgen | January 7, 2008Matt Nisbet thinks that Francis Collins should be the next presidential science advisor. He does this after rejecting excellent popularizes of science, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and E.O. Wilson, on the following grounds:
Most science popularizers such as Wilson or Tyson don't have the years of government experience to understand the machinations of Federal science policy. Moreover, they have a paper trail of strong opinions on issues that might make appointment politically tough.
I'm not sure what exactly those issues upon which they have strong opinions are. Is it that they're both…
razib | January 6, 2008p-ter has the details. For me one of the most confusing aspects of the Hobbits were the concomitant phenomena of extremely small cranial capacities (inference: low intelligence) with relatively advanced toolkits. If it the Hobbits exhibited the pathology reported in the paper which p-ter discusses that might be the solution.
razib | January 6, 2008
A few days ago I posted about selection and population structure. The basic idea is to imagine demes, breeding populations, and consider how variation in the standard parameters such as selection coefficient and migration might affect the overall frequencies of the alleles. The paper, Fixation Probability and Time in Subdivided Populations, was rather "old school" despite the recourse to simulation. It emerged out of the theoretical population genetic tradition of R.A. Fisher & Haldane, and their successors starting with Kimura. It utilized diffusion equations and rested upon standard…
evolvingthoughts | January 5, 2008
...said Charles Darwin, more than any man ever has. He should have, too - he spent seven years of his life working up the first encyclopedic monograph on the group. But that pales into insignificance compared to Alan Southward, who died last year.
The Other 95% has a very nice roundup post on Southward's work on barnacles, including a just-published paper, which you should immediately go read. And some nice pictures of my favourite historical invert, the Gooseneck Barnacle that gave rise to the myth of the Barnacle Goose.
pharyngula | January 5, 2008The NAS has a new edition of their Science, Evolution, and Creationism publication, which is a genuinely excellent piece of work. We've used the previous editions in our introductory biology course here at UMM, and if you want a short, plainly written introduction to the evidence for and importance of evolution to modern biology, I recommend it highly. It fills a niche well — it explains the science and gives a general overview for the layman without getting distracted by the details. And if $12 strains your wallet and 70 pages exceeds your attention span, you can download an 8 page summary…
laelaps | January 4, 2008Some of the biggest misunderstandings about the evolution of life on earth surround the "Cambrian Explosion," the popular impression often being that complex multicellular life sprung up out of nowhere in an instant. While it does appear that there was an "explosion" and that new body plans identifying early representatives of various phyla evolved rapidly, the Cambrian extinctions are usually ignored, and so too are the strange creatures that lived during the Ediacaran. The Ediacaran Period preceded the Cambrian, and while its exact span has been difficult to determine, it has been estimated…
gregladen | January 4, 2008An update on the hearings.
Florida Citizens for Science intones You made an impression. Congratulations! The hearings seem to have gone well, and the violation of the constitutional rights by christian fundamentalists of public school children of Florida may have been averted.
From tampabay.com:
A committee of teachers, scientists and others worked for months to update the current standards, which were written in 1996 and do not mention the word "evolution." Its revamp has won solid reviews from teachers and scientists. But some conservative Christians object, saying the standards should…
mikethemadbiologist | January 4, 2008You would think after the sound thrashing Michael Egnor received due to his mangling of the basics of evolutionary biology, the Discovery Institute might want to find someone else to quote in a guide for students. Nope:
"Microbiology tells us that bacterial populations are heterogeneous. Individual bacteria differ from one another. Molecular biology tells us that some bacteria have molecular mechanisms by which they can survive antibiotics. Molecular genetics tells us how these resistance mechanisms are passed to other bacteria and through generations of bacteria. Pharmacology helps us…
evolvingthoughts | January 3, 2008
Some press releases get the right money quote:
"The bottom line is that the world is round, humans evolved from an extinct species and Elvis is dead," Weissmann said. "This survey is a wake-up call for anyone who supports teaching information based on evidence rather than speculation or hope; people want to hear the truth, and they want to hear it from scientists."
By asking the questions in a non-loaded manner, FASEB managed to ascertain that 61% of Americans actually do accept evolution as a fact.
Oh, and the NAS has published the book online for free if you don't want a physical…
evolvingthoughts | January 3, 2008
Some bloggable items not worth a post on their own:
George MacDonald Fraser died. The author of the Flashman series, which I loved. Creating one of the best rogues in literature, Fraser also managed to get the history right.
Peter Hare died. Hare was one of the leading moral philosophers of the 20th Century.
Bradie and Harms have updated the excellent SEP entry on evolutionary epistemology.
Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny have updated their excellent piece on biological information also in SEP. I missed this at the time (October).
gregladen | January 3, 2008Thoughtful analysis on a recent poll regarding Evolution vs. Creationism.
razib | January 3, 2008Evolutionary genetics is subject to parameters; forces which pull and push and shape the nature of dynamic processes over time and space. Population size, mtuation rate, migration, selection. etc., these are all parameters we have to keep in mind when attempting to analyze the nature of evolutionary dynamics. The acceleration paper was predicated on consequences of changing on parameter, population size, upon other parameters such as selection, drift and the number of mutations. Of course I have wondered about the nature of population substructure and what it means for our species. My…
grrlscientist | January 3, 2008tags: National Academy of Sciences Press, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, books
The National Academy of Sciences Press has revised their excellent book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, which you can download for free. The book is a revision of an older version, which I own a hard copy of, and it has chapters on the nature of science, the evidence for evolution, and creationist claims. To receive the complete book as a free download [free PDF], you need to sign in, first. (You can get an 8-page summary PDF for free without signing in first).