evolution
laelaps | October 31, 2007Looks like I've got an editorial war on my hands. Yesterday I announced that my refutation of Brad Pironciak's "Social Darwinism" piece was printed in the college newspaper, The Daily Targum, and now I've received an editorial reply from English major Justin Fruhling. I don't have time to respond in full to his comments right now (you can read his piece here), but Fruhling's main complaint is that I didn't take "The Darwin Awards" or falling standardized test scores into account. Entirely missing the main point of my argument (intelligence is not wholly determined by inheritance and we should…
evolvingthoughts | October 30, 2007
From J. B. S. Haldane's 1932 The Causes of Evolution:
... I must ... discuss a fallacy which is, I think, latent in most Darwinian arguments, and which has been responsible for a good deal of poisonous nonsense which has been written on ethics in Darwin's name, especially in Germany before the [first world] war and in America and England since. The fallacy is that natural selection will always make an organism fitter in its struggle for the environment. This is clearly true when we consider members of a rare and scattered species. It is only engaged in competing with other species, and in…
evolvingthoughts | October 30, 2007
Here is an article in Harvard Magazine on bacteria and other wee beasties that make up the bulk of the living world, that is worth reading. It's called "The Undiscovered Planet". Hat tip to Jason Grossman.
loom | October 30, 2007 For those who may have come to the Loom after seeing me talking about autumn leaves on ABC News this evening, you can learn more about the science in these posts (plus this article I wrote for the New York Times).
Scientists continue to investigate why leaves change colors--check out this new post yesterday from Voltage Gate.
(I should also clarify that the damage leaves suffer in the fall can come from charged atoms within the leaf, rather than directly from the sun's photons.)
Update: Link to the ABC news segment added.
loom | October 30, 2007A quick note: I just found out I'll be on the ABC evening news tonight, about 5 minutes before the end of the show, talking about the mystery and glory of autumn leaves. I'll post a link when I find it.
Update: Voila.
laelaps | October 30, 2007Yesterday I wrote about an absolutely horrible opinion piece that appeared in the Rutgers newspaper The Daily Targum, the author suggesting that those he deemed stupid deserved to die. Although I gave a detailed response on this blog, I wanted to address the Rutgers community as a whole and I shot off an editorial reply to the paper. I didn't hear back from the Targum editors so I wasn't sure whether my piece would run or not (especially since I was critical of the editorial board for not checking Pironciak's piece), but lo and behold, it's been published. There's little in my response that I…
laelaps | October 29, 2007A little more than a week ago, scientist James Watson made a complete idiot of himself with some despicable and racist comments about the intelligence of white people and black people, and Greg Laden justifiably kicked his arse over the ill-founded statements. I was certainly surprised, then, to visit the official Rutgers University newspaper (The Daily Targum) website and see an opinion article by a freshman named Brad Pironciak who apparently has no idea what natural selection is, his piece being an idiotic espousal of Social Darwinism (although he didn't use the phrase that pays, "survival…
oracknows | October 29, 2007I was half-tempted to e-mail this one to P. Z. or Larry Moran, but my inherently merciful nature got the better of me. Because it was so idiotic, I was afraid that, after P. Z. and his regular readers got through with it (or even worse for this poor ID advocate, Larry Moran), there wouldn't be anything left other than a hint that there may have been a smear on the pavement where he had been. And, as much as this particular ID advocate and woo-meister has gotten on my nerves in the past outing me and all on at least three separate occasions, even I didn't want to see that. Besides, why should…
pharyngula | October 28, 2007Here's an interesting thought and modeling experiment: how to evolve a watch, literally.
As an example, it's nice, but there are also real biological examples of organisms evolving clocks — evolution of the period gene, for instance, which also shows evidence of being calibrated to day lengths by natural processes, or the somitic clock. Most organisms on the planet seem to have multiple clocks built right into them, and they've all evolved.
(via No More Mr. Nice Guy!)
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2007
UPDATED:
To give some of my colleagues at the University of Queensland some link love, it is being reported that they have sequenced the Queensland lungfish (currently under threat by a proposed dam) opsin genes, showing that they see in ultraviolet and visible light, as well as having the ability to see in dim and bright light. The paper is now accessible at BMC Evolutionary Biology.
The conclusion drawn from this is that early land dwelling vertebrates saw in colour, which is probably true, but not, I think, because the lungfish is a "living fossil that dates back 400 million years…
pharyngula | October 26, 2007You want a useful, practical, obvious example of evolution in action? Try this summary of corn evolution.
(via ERV)
hrynyshyn | October 25, 2007A paper speculating on the mechanisms responsible for the origin of life on Earth gets retracted, 52 years after it was published. Why? Because the author, a secular chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, is tired of creationists using it to support their arguments against evolution.
How sad. In his letter to American Scientist, where the paper was published in 1955, Jacobson writes that he discovered some errors in his paper:
Retraction this untimely is not normally undertaken, but in this case I request it because of continued irresponsible contemporary use by creationists who have…
evolgen | October 24, 2007Peer-to-Peer, one of Nature's many blogs, has a post on pseudoscience on preprint servers. The post is in response to a post from another blog (creationists using nature precedings to pre-publish junk science) that pointed out a potentially pseudoscientific article on Nature's preprint server, Nature Precedings (The saltational model for the dawn of H. sapiens, chin, adolescence phase, complex language and modern behavior). The article in question came off as creationist tripe to selena, who blogged about it at Tending the Garden.
This brings up a couple of questions. Taking a narrow focus,…
voltagegate | October 24, 2007Here we go again, folks:
Evolution is flawed because it can't tell us where life came from. The cell is too complex to have evolved by itself. Secularists are persecuting scientists who believe in God.
Spin. Spin. Spin. Vacuous, vicious propaganda. Again.
Let's not forget that Intelligent Design is not merely the belief that God created the universe, it is an attempt to displace science by allowing a hazy philosophical freedom of inquiry sans the scientific method. This is not about God or religion or freedom of speech, it's all about power plays and politics.
My dislike of Stein has been…
razib | October 23, 2007If you like the science on this weblog, I highly recommend Laelaps, Brian Switek's contribution to the ScienceBlogs network. Where I am more micro and anthro oriented he is more macro and spans the whole tree of life. I'm really glad he's on ScienceBlogs; Laelaps adds to the diversity in an interesting way.
In any case, I wanted to point to this long post, Troodon sapiens?: Thoughts on the "Dinosauroid", it mulls over many concepts and evolutionary processes. Brian highlights the alternative views of the paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. While Gould emphasized…
laelaps | October 23, 2007
Regardless of whether it was gradual or happened in a geologic instant, non-avian dinosaurs went extinct by approximately 65 million years ago, but the question of what they might be like today had they survived makes for some entertaining fiction. Most of such imaginary works are set on isolated islands or plateaus, "Lost Worlds" that have provided a refuge for dinosaurs (the most spectacular and enjoyable example being Weta Workshop's companion book to Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong entitled The World of Kong). Still, many of the dinosaurian hideaways do not take evolution into…
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2007
The estimable Drs David Williams and Malte Ebach have started a blog on Systematics and Biogeography, which supports a recent book they haven't sent me a free copy of yet. Expect much puncturing of pretensions and orthodoxies.
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2007
An article at Wired by Clive Thompson notes that the antievolutionists use rhetorical ploys, playing on the ambiguity of language to imply that "theory" just means "wild-arsed guess" (or words to that effect). He proposes that we should stop calling evolution a theory, and start calling it a "law".
I disagree:
The term "theory" has much wider application than "law", and in any event, the very same sorts of rhetorical ambiguity will be used for that too (a law requires a lawmaker, doesn't it? Hmm? So evolution is false, blah, blah, blah). In fact, "law" is the term that should be, and…
razib | October 22, 2007An Empirical Examination of Adaptationists' Attitudes Toward Politics and Science. You can find a full preprint at Geoffrey Miller's site. The abstract:
Critics of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have advanced an adaptationists-as-right-wing-conspirators (ARC) hypothesis, suggesting that adaptationists use their research to support a right-wing political agenda. We report the first quantitative test of the ARC hypothesis based on an online survey of political and scientific attitudes among 168 US psychology Ph.D. students, 31 of whom self-identified as adaptationists and 137 others…
evolvingthoughts | October 22, 2007
I am attempting to classify the various explanations of the existence of religion, so chime in the comments.
They are:
1. The intentionality explanation
Human beings are agents and highly adapted to social life. As a result, our cognition tends to take what Dennett calls the "intentional stance". That is, we ascribe intentions to non-agent processes. In earlier terminology, this was called "anthropomorphism", or the treating of non-human things as if they were human.
One will often read explanations of religion as the anthropomorphisation of natural processes like spring, rain,…