evolution
purepedantry | May 23, 2007The latest issue of Science magazine (May 18) has several reviews devoted to the coming of age of behavioral neuroscience. However, one by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg caught my eye. The review is entitled "Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science," and their core argument is that resistance to science in adulthood is the result of persistence of childhood traits. Ouch. Provocative from the very first.
Let's go into what they actually said before I say what I think about it.
The authors begin by listing the myriad litany of unsupported things that people believe: ESP,…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007An oldie but a goodie:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae symbol with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.…
razib | May 22, 2007The emergence of a superorganism through intergroup competition:
Surveys of insect societies have revealed four key, recurring organizational trends: (i) The most elaborated cooperation occurs in groups of relatives. (ii) Cooperation is typically more elaborate in species with large colony sizes than in species with small colony sizes, the latter exhibiting greater internal reproductive conflict and lesser morphological and behavioral specialization. (iii) Within a species, per capita brood output typically declines as colony size increases. (iv). The ecological factors of resource patchiness…
pharyngula | May 22, 2007Here are three animals. If you had to classify them on the basis of this superficial glimpse, which two would you guess were most closely related to each other, and which one would be most distant from the others?
On the left is a urochordate, an ascidian, a sessile, filter-feeding blob that is anchored to rocks or pilings and sucks in sea water to extract microorganismal meals. In the middle is a cephalochordate, Amphioxus, also a filter feeder, but capable of free swimming. On the right are some fish larvae. All are members of the chordata, the deuterostomes with notochords. If you'd…
voltagegate | May 22, 2007About a week or so back I actually checked my MySpace account to find an invite from a new conservation organization called EDGE: Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered, sponsored by the Zoological Society of London. NGOs nowadays are a dime a dozen, valuable but virtually identical. EDGE, however, seems to have, well, an edge.
They published a paper describing the application of their plan in PLoS One, my new favorite publication (a ton of ecology stuff, free and open access). EDGE is based on a relatively simple idea; they seek to prioritize mammalian conservation practice with…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007
A Reformed Dropout, who was in the audience of a talk Paul Griffiths and I gave on Dawkins' The God Delusion at UQ, writes a nice review. It was a fun night. I am glad that some of the attenders thought so too.
loom | May 21, 2007
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me quickly recap (and then, at your leisure, read this post.) Last November, my article on the evolution of complex features came out in National Geographic. A few weeks later the article inspired a long but baseless attack from the Discovery Institute, an outfit that promotes intelligent design (a k a "the progeny of creationism"). The attack, authored by one Casey Luskin, came in three parts, climaxing in an argument for intelligent design that required me to wire my jaw back shut: "Was the Ford Pinto, with all its imperfections revealed…
sporte | May 21, 2007tags: evolution, science education, Alliance for Science
A few months ago, I wrote about a contest, sponsored by the Alliance for Science, in celebration of Darwin Day. High school students were asked to write an essay on the topic: "Why would you want your doctor to have studied evolution?"
The winners have been announced and you can read their essays.
Congratulations winners, teachers, and all participants!
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have essences, only that there are diagnostic descriptions or definitions that allow naturalists to identify species in the field or in museum collections. But I'm no Linnaean scholar, so if anyone has information to the contrary, let me know.
Not much is known about the early education of poor Swedish…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2007"King Phillip Came Over From German Soil" - anyone remember that? It's a mnemonic, designed to make it easier to recall the Linnean ranks: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. Unfortunately, ranks change (Phylum and Family were inserted in the 1870s at an international meeting in Paris), and a new one has been proposed (and hotly debated): Domain. So what should the mnemonic now be? "Dumb King Phillip..."?
There are a host of mnemonics for biology (and even more for medicine). Jason Grossman, sometime commentator and fulltime good guy, sent me this suggestion:
I needed a…
oracknows | May 19, 2007A few days ago, I posted a note of congratulations to Gregory Simonian, a 10th grader at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, for winning the Alliance For Science essay contest, for which the topic was Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? At the time, the winners had been announced, though, the actual essays hadn't been published yet.
Now they are.
Head on over to the Alliance for Science website and read Greg's essay and the other three winning essays; they're each only two or three pages long, and it'll be well worth your time. (I'm only disappointed that none of…
razib | May 18, 2007Martin mulls over the question, Are Humans Polygamous? There is lots of interesting discussion, with a FinnXPer & reindeer lover in the fray. I think part of the confusion here is simply semantical. Cultural anthropologists often tend to define an -ogamy based on the preferred ideal within a society. So you have circumstances where the social ideal is polygyny, but for various reasons most males (and even females) aren't in polygynous relationships. In contrast, behavioral ecologists tend to look at it a different way, the extent of polygyny can be thought of as the ratio of the…
pharyngula | May 16, 2007Hey, you want some science? My latest Seed column on battling beetle balls is online.
(And I've just arrived in Ann Arbor after a long travel day!)
oracknows | May 16, 2007Here are a few typical eugenicist quotes from early last century:
"It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children."
"[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having good heredity, while those people having poor heredity should not marry at all."
"At the present time there are in the United States more than a million people with serious hereditary defects, and to reduce their numbers by even a few thousand would reduce the amount of…
mikethemadbiologist | May 16, 2007Let's leave aside decency and morality and try to forget that Romney eliminated funding for a gay teen suicide hotline to curry favor with the theopolitical Right. Let's not plumb the dark, foul abyss that is Mitt Romney's soul. Let's not ask how morally decrepit one would have to be to attempt to gain political office through the suicide of a child. Let's talk about evolution: Romney's not half bad.
Here's what Romney said:
"I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe," Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. "And I believe evolution is most likely the process he…
evolvingthoughts | May 16, 2007
Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.
Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.
Gosse's son, Edmund, wrote a rather unhappy memoir about growing up with a devout and strict father, called Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, in which he mentions this book:
My Father had never admired…
worldsfair | May 15, 2007"There is much misunderstanding of this term, and people often pack a lot of differing concepts under it. Consider this rant by a creationist in The American Spectator: there are "six types of evolution" according to him. They are cosmic evolution, chemical evolution, stellar evolution, organic (or organice [sic]) evolution, macroevolution and microevolution. Apart from being deeply ignorant about all the topics he classifies, some of this is just ridiculous."
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worldsfair | May 15, 2007"Most non-scientists seem to be quite confused about precise definitions of biological evolution. Part of the confusion is because the word "evolution" has many different meanings, depending on the context. When we talk about biology we are thinking about biological evolution and that's the term I want to define here. What do biologists mean when they refer to biological evolution?"
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mikethemadbiologist | May 15, 2007The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has posted of all of the articles from In the light of evolution I: Adaptation and complex design . It looks pretty interesting. And it's free! I can't wait to see how the creationists bollox this up...
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2007I spent the day in Washington D.C. yesterday. My SciBlings Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney were speaking at the annual meeting of the AIBS (that's the American Institute of Biological Sciences). The subject: How to communicate science effectively.
They make a number of persuasive points, and I certainly agree with their basic thesis. Scientists definitely need to be savvier in dealing with the media than they historically have been. But I'm still a little suspicious of some of their suggestions about evolution specifically. A bit too much “Lay off the religion!” for my taste.
It was…