evolution
mikethemadbiologist | July 5, 2007I've always thought if the evolutionary biologists who invented the term macroevolution--any evolutionary change at or above the level of species--knew the mischief that the creationists would do with it, they would have 'uninvented' the term right then and there.
I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but this post by ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford where he discusses a creationist who misuses macroevolution finally gave me the much needed kick in the assreason to do so. Creationists--some anyway--have built a cottage industry out of claiming that while they might accept '…
purepedantry | July 5, 2007Actually that isn't fair. It isn't wrong. The percentage of difference just depends heavily on what you define as a difference.
So argues an editorial by Jon Cohen in the latest issue of Science:
Using novel yardsticks and the flood of sequence data now available for several species, researchers have uncovered a wide range of genomic features that may help explain why we walk upright and have bigger brains--and why chimps remain resistant to AIDS and rarely miscarry. Researchers are finding that on top of the 1% distinction, chunks of missing DNA, extra genes, altered connections in gene…
evolvingthoughts | July 4, 2007
Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts.
One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument that there are at least three if not four senses or interpretations of probability and chance in evolution that - apart from anything else - prevents fitness being tautological, raises many more questions, but that is the nature of good papers.
Another, in no particular succession, is whether we…
purepedantry | July 3, 2007Rats show a type of "generalized" altruism:
Rats that benefit from the charity of others are more likely to help strangers get a free meal, researchers have found.
This phenomenon, known as 'generalized reciprocity', has only ever been seen before in humans. A good example, says Michael Taborsky of the University of Bern, Switzerland, is what happens when someone finds money in a phone box. In controlled experiments such people have been shown to be much more likely to help out a stranger in need following their good luck.
In humans, such benevolence can be explained by cultural factors as…
oracknows | July 3, 2007One thing that's become obvious to me over the last few years that I've been engaged in dealing with various forms of pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories is that people who are prone to credulity to one form of pseudoscience, the paranormal, or other crankery tend to be prone to credulity towards multiple forms of crankery. For example, Phillip Johnson, one of the "luminaries" of the "intelligent design" creationism movement is also a full-blown HIV denialist who doesn't accept the science that demonstrates that HIV causes AIDS. Another example is Dr. Lorraine Day,…
terrasig | July 1, 2007The New York Times Book Review section had a review today of Chris Mooney's new book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. (Review here; Chris' commentary here). The book was just released today and I look forward to reading it.
But continuing on, I couldn't help noting that Richard Dawkins reviewed Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Dawkins notes the unusual disclaimer from the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University distancing themselves from Behe then spends a lot of time on dogs.
From…
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2007ScienceBlogling Chris, responding to comments on a post he wrote about what he views as misplaced blogging priorities, writes:
....we can talk about what I do outside of the blogosphere to promote the non-scientific causes that are important to me. And cutting off your response before it ushers from your snarky fingers, a person who writes 9-10 rants a day on their blog, often responding to long articles elsewhere in cyberspace, and who has a day job (especially one in academia) is not, I guarantee you, doing a damn thing offline to promote any of the causes I mentioned or any like them.…
pharyngula | June 30, 2007What properties should we expect from an evolved system rather than a designed one? Complexity is one, another is surprises. We should see features that baffle us and that don't make sense from a simply functional and logical standpoint.
That's also exactly what we see in systems designed by processes of artificial evolution. Adrian Thompson used randomized binary data on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, followed by selection for FPGAs that could recognize tones input into them. After several thousand generations, he had FPGAs that would discriminate between two tones, or respond to the words…
clock | June 29, 2007Modern Brains Have An Ancient Core:
Hormones control growth, metabolism, reproduction and many other important biological processes. In humans, and all other vertebrates, the chemical signals are produced by specialised brain centres such as the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood stream that distributes them around the body.
Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] now reveal that the hypothalamus and its hormones are not purely vertebrate inventions, but have their evolutionary roots in marine, worm-like ancestors. In this week's issue of the journal Cell they…
mikethemadbiologist | June 28, 2007...and the psychological brickwalls they run into. With all of the talk about the Creationist Museum, I thought it would be worth discussing a museum that is trying to teach evolution. In the June 2007 issue of Evolution*, Diamond and Evans describe some of the responses to a revamped evolution exhibit, "Explore Evolution", at the Nebraska State Museum.
The authors conducted a survey of visitors to the Nebraska State Museum, asking them seven questions about the exhibit, with the goal of determining what cognitive biases existed among museumgoers (note: I've snipped the references):…
oracknows | June 27, 2007You may have noticed that I haven't commented much on Michael Behe's recent book, The Edge of Evolution, other than to bemoan its presence in the Evolution section of the University of Chicago Barnes & Noble. I have, however, read with some amusement some of the reviews. The most recent is one by--who else?--Richard Dawkins in the New York Times. Because it's behind the Times Select pay wall, I'll just give you a couple of the best quotes. First, he dismisses Behe's most famous book, Darwin's Black Box:
In "Darwin's Black Box," Behe simply asserted without justification that particular…
grrlscientist | June 27, 2007tags: Icadyptes salasi, giant penguin, ornithology, birds, avian
Two fossils recently discovered in Peru reveal that early penguins responded differently to natural climate change than scientists would have predicted. The larger skull, Icadyptes salasi (top), would have been fearsome to encounter because this penguin stood over five feet tall, and had a seven-inch beak, and is one of the largest penguins ever described. Compare this new penguin species to the smaller skull (below), which is from the modern-day Peruvian (Humboldt) penguin, Spheniscus humboldti.
Image: PNAS / Daniel Ksepka…
razib | June 27, 2007John Hawks has an excellent decomposition of the story yesterday in The New York Times about paleoanthropology and biology.
clock | June 26, 2007You probably know by now, but you can access for free (at least for a couple of days) a whole slew of articles about evolution on the Science page of New York Times. Most are excellent, as usual (hey, it's not the front page or some lukewarmly-pro-creationist he-said-she-said op-ed they tend to publish every now and then).
Most of the blogospheric responses are to the article by Douglas Erwin. As always, framing something as conflict sells the paper. I don't think we are all eagerly awaiting a 'paradigm shift' in evolutionary biology. Much of the new thinking has been around for decades…
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2007
Run by Matt Haber at Utah, it's a forum for discussions of work in progress, student matters like employment, tech issues and biology and society topics, to mention only a few. It's in alpha form now, but expect it to grow. The sidebar blurb is this:
Thank you for visiting the Philsophy of Biology Cafe. Our forums are currently under construction and are in ALPHA testing stages.
This forum is a place to come, sit down, and have a hearty swig of the many topics concerning philosophy and biology.
We try to keep things in a coffee-house theme (in case you didn't notice) so if you have any…
jrosenhouse | June 26, 2007Today's New York Times has a series of articles up about various aspects of evolution. One that caught my eye was this essay by paleontologist Douglas Erwin. It discusses various challenges to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Not the silly, brain-dead challenges of the creationists and ID folks, but the serious challenges from people who actually know what they are talking about.
Erwin begins by explaining the basics of Neo-Darwinism:
To understand the current tumult it helps to understand how our evolutionary framework developed. It was constructed from the 1930s to 1950s by early…
mikethemadbiologist | June 26, 2007Well, they're not my suggestions, they're David Hillis' But they are still pretty good.... In the June 2007 issue of Evolution, Hillis writes about how to make general biology textbooks discuss evolution better. He has a list of ten suggestions, and I thought it would be interesting to go through them (italics original; boldface mine; I cut a great deal of text*):
1) Demonstrate that evolutionary research is current and ongoing.... Post-Darwinian findings also present an excellent opportunity to teach about the process of science, and to show that the methods of evolutionary biology are…
hrynyshyn | June 26, 2007The New York Times Science section today is devoted entirely to evolution. Wonderful stuff, including a review of the idea that it is possible to encode messages in DNA, and the news that a team of biologists has done just that with E=mc2. For the essay's author, Dennis Overbye, the whole thing brings to mind fjord architect Slartibartfast of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy. But there's an even better sci-fi tie-in:
In the Star Trek: TNG epsiode "The Chase", Picard and the gang race to re-assemble bits of a message encoded in the genomes of disparate species throughout the galaxy…
razib | June 26, 2007John Noble Wilford in The New York Times has a piece titled The Human Family Tree Has Become a Bush With Many Branches, which reflects the current consensus thinking that the hominid lineage was until recently relatively diversified, with a host of species extant contemporaneously (the other view is that many of the "species" we conjecture are just the extant morphological variation of one species across varied local ecological conditions). To be honest the piece seemed to just be throwing a lot of genus and species names at you all the while stirring up the tempest in the tea pot between…
pharyngula | June 26, 2007The NY Times has pulled out all the stops today and has dedicated their entire science section to the subject of evolution. They've got pieces by some of the best science journalists around, like Carl Zimmer, Cornelia Dean (although in this case, it's a lot of nattering on about how the soul fits into evolution—not recommended), and Natalie Angier, and they've also drafted a few scientists. There's a video of Sean Carroll summarizing evo-devo, and perhaps the most interesting article of them all is by Douglas Erwin, in which he speculates about whether the new ideas percolating throughout the…