evolution
evolvingthoughts | November 6, 2007
I can't believe Laelaps beat me to this (shows how on the ball he is) but he's just noted a paper that I watched getting written, and discussed in detail with Chris Glen, a very smart and talented young paleontologist, before I got to. So I will now, before he goes and does a better job.
Chris and his advisor Michael Bennett have come up with a possible way to test the "trees down or ground up" controversy about the origins of flight. That is, they have some independent evidence that early birds were basically ground dwellers, but that there was, as there is now, a mix of lifestyles…
mikethemadbiologist | November 6, 2007In commenting on a post by SA Smith that rebuts (quite well) Behe's latest ID creationist idiocy, tristero writes (bold original; italics mine):
But reading Smith's post on HIV evolution, I have to confess I can't for the life of me understand it. Ms Smith, I promise I'll spend some more time on it later and try to puzzle it out; I like that kind of a challenge (and please don't bother rewriting it for civilians, you've got better things to do!). But the tactic Behe is employing worries me, because it is so cynical, and dangerously effective.
Essentially, id creationists are slowly trying to…
loom | November 6, 2007I am a bone geek, I confess. On my bookshelves are a bunch of coffee-table books full of skulls, femurs, and xyphoid processes. They include From Lucy To Language, loaded with hominid remains, Human Bones for our current anatomy, and Fossils for a quick hit of Deep Time. An excellent addition to this sub-sub-genre is called, simply, Evolution. It's loaded with gorgeous pictures of vertebrate skeletons (including this angler). In today's New York Times, I have a photoessay with several other selections. You can check out a slide show here.
Update: I forgot to mention that I talk about the…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
In a famous essay Borges wrote of an infinite library that contained all possible books (and most of it nonsense at that). The mind is not like that. It has only a few books in it.
In the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, there are competing views of the nature of the mind. One school, the evolutionary psychologists, hold that the mind is composed of a large number of special purpose modules, each designed by natural selection to do one thing well (enough) and no more. Another school, represented by Jerry Fodor, holds that the central part of the mind (excepting the sensorimotor parts…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
Bill Wimsatt is one of the philosophy of biology's underappreciated performers. Many of his takes on biology have influenced a great many people, including me. Here is an interview with him on his latest book Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Harvard Press, 2007). According to the interview, he takes our cognitive limitations as a virtue. I hope to get a copy sometime, after which I'll review it. He says
“Complex systems are messy,” said Wimsatt, gesturing to the 400-page synthesis of his work. “And human beings make errors trying to…
pharyngula | November 5, 2007Perhaps you haven't noticed, but we've got a serial spammer in the comments. This twit, calling himself Peter Moore (also known as Ken DeMyer, or Kdbuffalo, as he was known on Wikipedia before being banned there), is repeating himself over and over again, asking the same stupid question, never satisfied with any answer anyone gives him. Forty nine insipid comments in three days is enough.
I will answer him one last time. Any further attempt to spam multiple comment threads with his demands (and this alone makes him an ass: an incompetent, unqualified hack like Moore is in no position to make…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
What with Hollywood archetypes of "animal rights activists" coming out of the woodwork lately, Ryan Gregory and Larry Moran pose the following question:
And so I ask, on what basis do you draw the sharp moral line between "humans" and "animals", "human rights" and "animal rights", "us" versus "them"? What rational argument do you bring in defense of speciesism? Perhaps you argue that only humans are capable of suffering, or that our intellectual capabilities are of a different kind from those of other animals. As Dawkins has noted, neither is compatible with what we understand about…
laelaps | November 5, 2007
Even though I didn't get to go to SVP this year, my friends Julia and Neil were in attendance and were kind enough to send me a *signed* copy of Don Prothero's newest book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. Although I was already in the middle of a book when Prothero's book arrived at my door, I dropped what I was reading and started tearing through the glossy pages, and I have to say that I was impressed. Aside from the excellent illustrations by the talented Carl Buell (plus tons of photographs and other diagrams), Prothero's book doesn't hold back when it comes to…
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don't care.
A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in public engagement. So what? I hear you ask. This is old stuff. But what is new here is that it is the scientists who start the debates, before the public has a chance to react and set up the framing issues, to ensure that a reasonable and informed debate is had. It is called upstream public engagement.
I think this might be a useful modus operandi for other public intellectual domains;…
laelaps | November 3, 2007After many false starts I've actually started to write my "treatise" on evolution, some of the pages I've been turning out being in note form (I want to get the ideas down and then fill in the exact details later when I can pick up the proper reference books from the shelf) while others resemble actual passages and are in a near-finished form. My work isn't going to be a chronological overview of the history of life like many other books, but will instead take a more personal approach reflecting how I've come to understand evolution and how it proceeds. Differing rates of change, convergence…
laelaps | November 3, 2007
Today's photo is of a Lesser Tree Shrew (Tupaia minor), sitting still for a split second allowing me to get a somewhat blurry shot. I wasn't initially thinking of putting this one up today, but I thought it would be a topical choice given a new study in Scienceout this week that suggests Colugos (Family Cynocephalidae) may be more closely related to primates than Tree Shrews (Order Scandentia). Using partial genomic data from both groups (plus primates), the research team found that the colugos were more closely related to primates than the tree shrews, although we have yet to see if this…
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
[This started as a discussion of the debate mentioned below. It got lost somewhere, and became me riffing on my favourite topics. Sorry.]
I love it when people I know have a barny* in public, but it presents some delicate choices and sensibilities to be honoured. The case in point today is between Malte Ebach and David Williams in the red corner, and Joseph Felsenstein in the blue. I'm not the referee - I'm just the seasoned journalist in the front row...
The issue is what counts when we classify in biology, and why. Malte and David argue that there are some notions of classification…
mikethemadbiologist | November 2, 2007I've been reading about the AEI seminar about IQ in Ashkenazic (of European ancestry) Jews with some interest (ScienceBlogling Razib raises a really good point that I hadn't thought of too). A few years ago, I was asked to review a paper that dealt with this issue.
Let me state that I think IQ as a measure of intelligence doesn't mean all that much, except when it is extremely low or extremely high. Nonetheless, it is a trait that we can measure--we should just be very careful about how much importance we place on IQ.
OK, back to the paper I was asked to review. It basically made the same…
voltagegate | November 2, 2007In Part I we looked at the eastern hemlock's northwestern progression after the last ice age,
and the frequency of the hemlock along a slope-oriented moisture gradient:
The distribution pictured above is almost exactly the case in the Laurel Hill old growth stand. The hemlocks are dense at the moist valley bottom, surrounding and shading Laurel Hill Creek and At the different levels of the gradient, not only does the abundance of trees differ, but the composition of the ecosystem. There is a "no-man's land" of sorts between each level that ecologists called ecotones.
Ecotones are imaginary…
grrlscientist | November 1, 2007tags: Ask a Science Blogger, vertebrate eye, molluscan eye
Image: Wikipedia. [larger view].
The newest "Ask a Science Blogger" question is; Which parts of the human body could you design better?
Since I have only 500 words or so to explain, I will discuss only one anatomical feature: I would choose to redesign the vertebrate eye so the microscopic structure of the retina more closely resembles that of the molluscan eye.
On causal observation, the vertebrate eye appears to be similar to the cephalopod eye (cephalopods are often thought of as the "classical" mollusc), however, a more…
razib | October 31, 2007Statistical evaluation of alternative models of human evolution:
An appropriate model of recent human evolution is not only important to understand our own history, but it is necessary to disentangle the effects of demography and selection on genome diversity. Although most genetic data support the view that our species originated recently in Africa, it is still unclear if it completely replaced former members of the Homo genus, or if some interbreeding occurred during its range expansion. Several scenarios of modern human evolution have been proposed on the basis of molecular and…
jrosenhouse | October 31, 2007Back in June, Brown University biologist Ken Miller published this review of Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution in Nature magazine. Considering the venue, Miller quite appropriately focused on Behe's rather dubious scientific arguments and showed that they were entirely incorrect.
Miller has now published a second review (not freely available online), this time in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. The scientific flaws are hardly the only thing wrong with Behe's arguments, it seems. In Miller's view, Behe's arguments have disturbing theological consequences:
A hopeful reader…
purepedantry | October 31, 2007There is a really cool paper in Current Biology about the how even an animal's sensory apparatus adapt to their particular evolutionary niche.
Greiner et al. looked at four closely-related species of ants from the genus Myrmecia. (As you can see from the picture, these ants are also huge.) These four species are all relatively similar lifestyles, going out to forage on daily intervals. The four species differ, however, on when they go out to look for food. Some of them go out in mid-day; some go out only at night.
The authors compared the time when the animals would forage with the size…
voltagegate | October 31, 2007Catch up on all of your fall foliage science with Carl at The Loom. He has all the links you need, even one to his interview on ABC News.
evolvingthoughts | October 31, 2007
To summarise: so far we have three general kinds of explanations of religion. There are sociological explanations in terms of the economic, societal and political conditions under which religions develop. There are psychological explanations in terms of experiences, existential dread, need for control and so forth. And there are sociobiological explanations that may or may not incorporate both of these. These latter accounts are founded on some aspect of a shared human nature, but they need not be essentialistic, in the sense that each human shares them, only that any population of humans…