evolution
pharyngula | May 29, 2007Let's encourage this trend of scientific societies coming out with unambiguous statements of support for good science. The latest addition is the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada-Ottawa Centre statement on evolution: it's short and to the point.
The RASC Ottawa Centre supports high standards of scientific integrity, academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also respects the scientific method and recognizes that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypotheses, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.
The RASC…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Creationists and literalists like to talk about the book of Genesis as if it were a science textbook, which they can interpret to find anything that science has independently discovered unless they don't like it, such as evolution.
A while back, I got to thinking, "What sort of world would it be if Genesis were right?" And so I started casually reading it from time to time as if the final editor of Genesis actually meant the things he allows the text to say. This is the first in an intermittent and occasional series.
Now it is clear that Genesis is a redaction (a fancy word for edited…
grrlscientist | May 29, 2007tags: Darwin, Darwin Correspondence Project, evolution, biology
I have mentioned this before when the project was first underway, but all of Darwin's letters are now catalogued online for everyone to read. For those of you who don't know, Darwin was a prolific correspondent, regularly writing to nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. Among his correspondents were geologist Charles Lyell, the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, as well as well-known thinkers and public figures, as well as ordinary men and…
voltagegate | May 29, 2007Morphologically, the red panda is a strange little furball. They are categorized with carnivores because of their powerful set of reinforced jaws, but the only meat the red panda will ever eat is the occasional bug. Like the giant panda, bamboo makes up most of its diet, one of the least nutritious foods on the planet.
But the red panda and its ancestors have been eating bamboo (and other similar monocots) for so long, that a small wristbone called a radial sesamoid (highlighted in red below) has become modified into an extra "thumb," assisting the panda in grasping and stripping bamboo…
sporte | May 29, 2007The first research assignment for our Alaska NSF Chautauqua course has been posted. Your task is to find a wound-inducible plant gene, learn something about it, and post a description in the comment section. We've already had one excellent answer, but I know there are at least 54 wound-inducible genes, so I expect to see more.
Once we get our genes in order (and possibly before), we'll talk more about designing an experiment for detecting gene expression.
In the meantime, I have some pre-course reading assignments to help you prepare.
tags: plants, Alaska, NSF Chautauqua courses,…
evolvingthoughts | May 28, 2007
The Missouri Botanical Garden Library has made a Web 2.0 site of botanical works, the Botanicus Digital Library:
Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanicus is made possible through support from the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
As always I just love it when someone hands me facsimile copies of ancient publications (although they have some more recent stuff too), all under a Creative Commons license.
oracknows | May 28, 2007i think I've made it exquisitely clear how much I detest and despise the term "Nevile Chamberlain School of Evolutionists." Indeed, my disgust at the term led me to sic the Hitler Zombie on (of all people) Richard Dawkins, the originator of the term, a deed that was either the boldest thing I've ever done as a blogger or the stupidest. (In retrospect, I haven't decided which.) Recently, however, one of the most vociferous users of the term (and fellow victim of the Hitler Zombie with Richard Dawkins) seems to have backed away from the use of the term. I'm talking about Larry Moran, of course…
voltagegate | May 28, 2007Photo by: Chief Trent
The Red Panda is definitely in the running for the most Pokémon-like animal in the history of the world. My internal Cute-O-Meter runs high every time I come across one in the zoo.
But the taxonomic category these little cuties occupy is perhaps one of the most disputed in classification. Most scientists place them with procyonids, the raccoon family. But some scientists are not satisfied. Red pandas exhibit many of the characteristics of bears (ursids) as well; reflected in one of their common names, the catbear (not to be confused with the binturong, known as the…
oracknows | May 27, 2007I've been a bit remiss in my blog carnival plugging; so here's my chance to make up for it. Here are some carnivals worth checking out:
Carnival of Bad History #14: The Backlog Edition (The name speaks for itself.)
Carnivalesque #27 (Ancient, medieval and early modern history.)
Tangled Bank #80 (Science.)
The Creation Museum (The blogosphere's skeptical response to Ken Ham's creationism museum, which recently opened. Unfortunately, I forgot about this, and didn't write up something suitably snarky myself, but fortunately plenty of other bloggers did. Alas, the message will be lost on the…
hrynyshyn | May 27, 2007If hell was real, a place of honor would be reserved for Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who blocked a plan to honor Rachel Carson last week. We named our cat after Carson, so you can guess how angry this makes me.
From a Reuters report a couple of days ago"
"Rachel Carson's work both directly and indirectly created a climate of hysteria and misinformation about the impact of DDT on the human populations," said John Hart, a spokesman for Coburn, in explaining why the Oklahoma Republican withheld his support for the plan to honor her.
"Obviously her central claim about what it does to ecosystems…
mikethemadbiologist | May 27, 2007From Monday to Friday, I attended the American Society for Microbiology meeting held in Toronto. Before I get to some of the interesting science, my apologies to all of the people who suggested we meet up. Unfortunately, I never look at the blog (or almost never) while I'm on the road, so I missed your messages (it's best to email me directly). Anyway, here's the list of random things:
The E. coli responsible for the spinach outbreak is found in many feral swine. Hence, feral swine are a possible reservoir of E. coli O157:H7. Of course, feral pigs roaming around California in…
sporte | May 27, 2007An introduction to our Alaskan NSF Chautauqua course and a pre-course assignment.
I don't know how well this will work, but I thought it might be interesting this year to experiment with blogging about our course and sharing some of our experiences with the rest of the world. Here's your chance readers, if you'd like to do some of the assignments, you are very welcome to follow along and give it a try.
tags: plants, Alaska, NSF Chautauqua courses, bioinformatics, sequence analysis, evolution, wound inducible genes, moose
I'm not likely to get all the assignments or course info posted on-…
evolvingthoughts | May 26, 2007
OK, I can't be hedgehogged doing a coherent post today. I'm tired and shagged out after a long talk (lecturing for others who went and had fun somewhere, the bastards!). So instead here are random links and thoughts that happen to be open in my browser right now...
The first is the notion of an "error theory". This is a term derived from the writings of John Mackie, who thinks that objective moral values would be very odd things, and that people who think they are looking for them are just in error (hence "error theory"). This came up because we were doing the Friday evening drinks thing,…
clock | May 26, 2007Larry just won the Triple Crown (or a trifecta, betting on the Triple Crown) with the third post in a trio of posts on a very important topic:
Facts and Myths Concerning the Historical Estimates of the Number of Genes in the Human Genome
The Deflated Ego Problem
SCIENCE Questions: Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?
Alex Palazzo, madhadron, Ricardo Azevedo and PZ Myers add thoughtful commentary as well.
Of course, this is something that has been debated and studied (yes, in the laboratory) for a long time by people like Dan McShea so the issue is not going to be solved any time soon with a few…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
Razib at Gene Expression has a nuanced and well supported argument about the proportion of religion-supporters versus the proportion of religiosity in various European and Asian cultures. I strongly recommend it.
One of his claims is that the "default" state of humans is a kind of religiosity; I think I agree with him. Humans have all kinds of default "wild type" programs in their psyche and cognition which in a high density population will tend to fall out as religion. Does this mean that atheism is doomed? Or that secularism (which is a different thing) is doomed? I think there will be…
pharyngula | May 25, 2007We've often heard this claim from creationists: "there is no way for genetics to cause an increase in complexity without a designer!". A recent example has been Michael Egnor's obtuse caterwauling about it. We, including myself, usually respond in the same way: of course it can. And then we list examples of observations that support the obviously true conclusion that you can get increases in genetic information over time: we talk about gene duplication, gene families, pseudogenes, etc., all well-documented manifestations of natural processes that increase the genetic content of the organism.…
mikethemadbiologist | May 25, 2007A couple of weeks ago, after I posted about a very serious emerging bacterial threat, KPC, I received an email from a reader with an elderly relative in the hospital with a very serious case of pneumonia caused by KPC. What he* told me is shocking.
The relative, who has had repeated hospital stays and a previous MRSA infection, was in the hospital for a week before any laboratory cultures were performed. That's right, a patient with practically every major risk factor for a multidrug resistant infection wasn't tested for a week. So this patient wasn't isolated, exposing other ICU patients and…
oracknows | May 24, 2007Our creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, isn't going to like this one bit. No doubt he'll try to call it "artificial selection" or a "tautology" when he finds out about it, if he doesn't just ignore it because he it doesn't fit in with his view that studying evolution is "of no value" in medicine. Too bad, because, via Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline, I've found a really cool application of evolutionary biology to the development of antibiotic resistance in response to vancomycin that sheds light on the molecular mechanisms behind the development of antibiotic resistance in…
loom | May 23, 2007A few months ago I got in my car and drove north until I reached a remarkable building filled with several million mice. At Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, scientists are studying mice to understand many mysteries of genetics and medicine. But I was particularly curious about a project that they've only recently launched: an attempt to understand how many genes working together give rise to complex traits. When those complex traits go awry, the result may be a common disease such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. The article I wrote about what I learned, "Mendel's Mouse,"…
loom | May 23, 2007The paddlefish is a surreal giant, with a spatula-shaped nose that some scientists believe it uses to sense the electric fields of its prey, which it sucks up like a whale. You might not think of it as an animal that has much to offer in our quest to understand ourselves. But in fact, underneath the glaring differences, paddlefish and humans share some surprising similarities. And those similarities are precious clues to how our distant ancestors evolved hands and feet.
Back 400 million years ago, our ancestors swam with fins. The descendants of those early fish split off into two main…