evolution
evolvingthoughts | November 21, 2007
This is the fourth of a series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Wilson and Wilson (W&W) then continue on to employ some recent work on individuals as groups, and the "major transitions" literature.
Ed Wilson is well known for his idea of "superorganisms", in which eusocial hives or colonies of insects (his speciality) are treated evolutionarily as single organisms, resolving a problem Darwin had with these species' evolution. In other words, an ant colony is a fitness bearer. Here, W&W appeal to Lynn Margulis' theory of the eukaryotic cell as a symbiosis between prokaryotic cells to…
terrasig | November 21, 2007I was looking through more links tonight after posting earlier on the Polk County school board's intention to introduce intelligent design into the science curriculum.
I saw this post, An Open Letter to the Polk County, Florida School Board from The Austringer, Dr Wesley Elsberry. Turns out that Elsberry is a product of [a] public schools [and two parochial schools] in Lakeland, the largest city in Polk Country.
From his compelling open letter:
I was born in Lakeland, Florida, and lived for eighteen years there. My parents still live there. I still care about what happens in my home town.
To…
jrosenhouse | November 21, 2007The wonderfully named online magazine Jewcy, has been hosting a discussion about evolution and ID. Three entries so far:
Neal Pollack gets the ball rolling by suggesting that he wants his children to grow up “utterly intolerant” of creationism. My kind of guy!
Discovery Institute flak David Klinghoffer recites the standard talking points.
Yours truly brings it home with this eloquent missive.
I certainly like where Pollack ends up:
A parent can no longer assume that his children won't encounter anti-evolutionary propaganda. While I'm skeptical about religion, I'm not opposed to faith and…
terrasig | November 21, 2007 All the kool kids are keeping their eyes on the Polk County, Florida, school board and their contention that 'intelligent design' should be taught alongside evolution in their public schools.
Fortunately, several states have groups of concerned citizens who contend that actual science should be taught in schools, lest we continue to suffer as a society from the erosion of critical thinking skills.
Florida Citizens for Science (FCS, or FlCfS) is one of those valuable groups. Brandon Haught has been doing a terrific job keeping us apprised of local developments via the Florida Citizens for…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2007
The African apes don't get much good news these days. But the Congo has just announced they are setting up a preserve to protect the bonobo. The size of the Sankuru Nature Reserve is 11,803 square miles (in real money, 30 569.629 square kilometers), which makes it nearly half the size of Tasmania, or bigger than Massachusetts or Hawai'i.
This is a cooperative venture between a partnership involving American and Congolese conservation groups and government agencies, and they are addressing the local practices of hunting bonobos as well. All bonobos in the wild live in the Congo.
Hat tip…
loom | November 20, 2007Once the writers' strike is over, anyone in the mood to make a new monster movie might consider this beast, described today in the journal Biology Letters. It's Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, a "sea scorpion" that lived 390 million years ago. Based on a fossil of its enormous claws was found in Germany, scientists estimate it measured 2.5 meters long. It's the biggest arthropod yet known, a giant among giants. At this period in the history of life, lots of insects, millipedes, and other sea scorpions grew to science-fiction sizes, possibly thanks to the high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere at…
loom | November 20, 2007The deja vu is hitting hard.
Two years ago a Pennsylvania court was hearing a challenge to introducing intelligent design into a public school in the town of Dover. At the time, I argued that people should look south to understand the stakes of the conflict. Down in Florida the state government seemed to be trying to have it both ways when it came to creationism. The chair of the state House Education Council introduced a bill that would allow students to sue their professors if they didn't consider intelligent in class. Governor Bush refused to comment on whether intelligent design should be…
loom | November 20, 2007A couple months ago, I wrote a feature for Discover about the intriguing possibility that life might have originated more than once on Earth--and that maybe those alternative life forms were still alive among us today. Paul Davies, one of the scientists who has explored this idea in recent years, has written an account of it that's the cover story of this month's Scientific American. Check it out. Davies offers some neat possibilities, such as the notion that living things might use arsenic instead of phosphorus to store energy. One creature's poison...
mikethemadbiologist | November 20, 2007
While the most recent misrepresentation of antibiotic resistance at Answers in Genesis by Georgia Purdom is not of the two usual varieties (either resistance evolves through gene transfer, and therefore mutation does not cause antibiotic resistance, or resistance arises through mutations only, and so mutations can't lead to novel 'kinds'--yes, creationists are that stupid), it's still pretty bad, and it shows a profound ignorance of recent work in the field of antibiotic resistance.
Purdom writes:
The mechanisms of mutation and natural selection aid bacteria populations in becoming resistant…
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2007
[The third in a series on a recent paper by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. Post 1; Post 2]
In presenting a group selectionist account of sociobiology, Wilson and Wilson argue that alternatives such as kin selection are not really alternatives.
Kin selection and multiplayer games
Attacking the third leg of the tripod, W&W argue that even genic or individual selectionist accounts implicit include the existence of groups as a factor in evolution. This resolves, as far as I can see, to the view that equivalence classes in genetic selection form a group: if a population is…
pharyngula | November 19, 2007Scooped! I've long adored vulvas, having written a few things on how to develop a vulva and how to evolve a vulva, so I'm a little peeved that this upstart at scienceblogs, Greg Laden, has written up a recent story on nematode vulva evolution before me. Aaargh, all vulvas must be mine! I've just got too much other work stacked in front of me.
I may have to revisit this story later, though. I made a quick skim of the paper and don't see quite how they arrived at their conclusion, that vulva evolution is dominated by selective events rather than chance. I can't say they're wrong, but I'm going…
oracknows | November 19, 2007...apparently, that's what the Discovery Institute thinks, as William Dembski proudly announces, for reasons that escape me:
Michael Medved, nationally syndicated talk radio host and bestselling author, has joined the Discovery Institute in the role of senior fellow. The position cements a longstanding friendship and recognizes a commonality of values and projects across a spectrum of issues.
"Michael Medved is an intellectual entrepreneur, a political and cultural polymath with great insights, judgment and wit. We are delighted to have this new relationship with him," said Discovery…
evolvingthoughts | November 18, 2007
Wilson and Wilson begin by reviewing the reasons why sociobiology of the 1970s was rejected. They focus on the arguments against group selection.
Levels of selection
In the period in which sociobiology was first proposed under that label (from now on, the term sociobiology refers to this period, as outlined in Ullica Segerstråle's Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond), there was an ongoing debate over whether gene-level selection was the sole form of selection, or whether some kind of group selection was also in play. W&W argue that,…
pharyngula | November 18, 2007Wilkins is about to review a new paper on sociobiology by Wilson and Wilson, but he hasn't quite done it yet. I'll be looking forward to it, though.
Wilkins calls himself an unflinching sociobologist. I'm more of a lapsed sociobiologist with a fairly positive view of the field. The book Sociobiology was actually my very first serious introduction to the depth of biology — I picked it up when I was an undergraduate, way back in 1975, and read it all the way through. I was impressed in my naive fashion, and was baffled by the sociobiology wars that raged for a time — I was particularly…
gregladen | November 18, 2007Or, to be less crude, did modern humans, having already evolved in Africa, interbreed with the local Europeans who were Neanderthals, and if so, did they produce fertile offspring ... and, did this happen in sufficient degree to have mattered at all to the genetics of later (but not necessarily living) people?
In my opinion, the answer is, of course they interbred. There are many reasons to believe this if almost no way to prove it. Indeed, the evidence of this interbreeding is virtually nil. With every additional test of the interbreeding hypothesis using DNA, the null hypothesis of no…
evolvingthoughts | November 17, 2007
It's not often I get to comment on as-yet-unpublished work, but I have been sent a copy of a forthcoming essay by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, two giants of the theoretical evolutionary field, defending and redefining the nature of sociobiology (Wilson and Wilson 2007). As I have recently (i.e., in the last five years) come to be an unflinching sociobiologist, I think it is worthwhile summarising their argument and making some comments. This is the first in a rambling series riffing on that paper.
Introduction
Back in the dark ages, when I was a masters student, Kim Sterelny…
evolvingthoughts | November 17, 2007
I have always enjoyed reading the work of Frans de Waal, a primatologist who focuses on the social structure and psychology of apes, particularly the two chimp species, and monkeys. His previous books, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist, and Peacemaking among Primates have all entranced me and inspired my reflections on such diverse topics as evolutionary psychology, the origins of political and social structures, and, of course, the evolution of religion.
His recent book, Our…
gregladen | November 16, 2007Here is a preliminary list of resources for people to find out more about Intelligent Design. Please feel free to put this on your own site. If you want, email me and I'll send you the HTML code to make this one step easier. But you can also, if you are using Firefox, use "ctrl-u" to display the code and cut and paste it from there.
Please feel free to add to this resource for people who want to learn more about Intelligent Design.
Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design
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Intelligent Design…
sporte | November 16, 2007As many of you know, I'm a big fan of do-it-yourself biology. Digital biology, the field that I write about, is particularly well-suited to this kind of fun and exploration.
Last week, I wrote some instructions for making a phylogenetic tree from mitochondrial genomes. This week, we'll continue our analysis.
I wrote this activity, in part, because of this awful handout that my oldest daughter brought home last year. She presented me with an overly photocopied paper that showed several protein sequences from cytochrome C in several creatures. She said she was supposed count the…
jrosenhouse | November 15, 2007Over at The Christian Century, biologist Joan Roughgarden serves up this review of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution.
The good news is that Roughgarden is unambigously pro-evolution and anti-ID. She writes:
Behe's position has been criticized scientifically and theologically. The structures thought to be irreducibly complex aren't; precursor structures can be identified whose modification can lead to a flagellum--or any other trait, for that matter. Furthermore, ID advocates don't offer any hypothesis about what happened in the evolutionary past--where, when and how did the designer…