evolution
Didn't I just say "Woo hoo" yesterday? False alarm. Scarcely do I clear one set of major tasks away than another set rise up. I already mentioned that I was going to be the speaker at the Humanists of Minnesota banquet on Saturday evening. I neglected to tell you all that I'm leaving for the University of Michigan tomorrow to give the keynote at the Genetic Programming Theory and Practice Workshop.
I know virtually nothing about genetic programming, so this is a wonderful opportunity to learn something about it.
Since I'm certainly not going to be able to tell them a thing about genetic…
The winners of the Alliance for Science essay contest that I mentioned a couple of months ago, where high school students were asked to write an essay of 1,000 words or less about the topic Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?, have been announced.
My only question is why the actual essays aren't posted on the Alliance's website. I did find, however, that the winner, Gregory Simonian, has a blog, where he describes his struggle to write the winning essay:
I'll give you some behind-the-scenes commentary. I had a super tough time cutting that essay within the word limit. I had…
Paul Rubin has an editorial in the Washington Post about how evolution may result in a proclivity towards economic and social conflict:
Conflict was common in the environment in which humans evolved. As primates, which are a very social order, our ancestors lived in relatively small groups in which everyone knew everyone else. Our minds are adapted to deal with populations of that size. Our ancestors made strong distinctions between members of the in-group and outsiders, and we still make such distinctions today -- social psychologists can create in-group and out-group feelings based on…
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter. All religions were to be tolerated. Having done a good thing in the context of the religious wars of Europe, Locke then did a bad thing which continues to echo today. He wrote:
Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in…
By way of Oliver Willis, I stumbled across these outtakes from the movie Flock of Dodos. I will never stop being amazed by the disingenuousness of the ID movement:
In what is for this furriner a somewhat perplexing column, Kathleen Parker, who is supposedly one of the Washington Post stable of writers, argues that the question asked of Republican nominees for presidency - Do you believe in evolution? - was unfair.
I fail to see why. Sure, nobody expects the president to select the next generation of successful breeders for any generation, but this is a good surrogate test of whether or not the candidate thinks science is to be trusted, or whether they think, as this administration odes, that they can choose the reality in which they operate with…
Our culture wars make for strange ironies. The fight over the cervical cancer vaccine is a case in point.
Yesterday news broke that a vaccine for cervical cancer might not be all it's cracked up to be. Cervical cancer is caused by a virus known as human papillomavirus. It infects epithelial cells in the skin and other surface layers of the body, including the vagina and throat. On rare occasion it causes its host cells to start replicating madly, creating growths that sometimes progress into full-blown tumors. It's a major menace: the American Cancer Society estimates that it causes 17…
All I did was get my beloved Powerbook 12" serviced, and what happens? The Interlub goes wild with great stuff. Or was it always, and I only noticed because I was unable to blog? So, here is a rough and ready roundup of interesting things.
Before I do, I'd like to note that Paul Griffiths and I had a wonderful time last night talking to the Philosophy Students Association about Dawkins' The God Delusion. You, my loyal readers, already know my views on this, so I won't rehearse them here. But Paul made a comment I had to think about overnight. He does that. It was basically about religious…
There was a time when the publication of the entire sequence of a genome--any genome--was exciting news. I don't have any particular passion about Haemophilus influenzae, a microbe that can cause the flu various infections. But in 1997 it was the first species to have its genome sequenced. It became immensely fascinating, simply because we could now, for the first time, scan all of its genes. Now the global genome factory is cranking away so quickly--with over five hundred sequences published and over two thousand in the pipeline--that a new genome is not necessarily news. There has to be…
The American Naturalist is celebrating 140 years. Check out their list of most cited papers over the decades, gives you a good flavor of major issues in evolution & genetics.
My previous contributions to the basic concepts in science collection were on gastrulation and neurulation, so let's add the next stage, and the one I named the blog after: the pharyngula.
First, though, a few general remarks on developmental stages. In some ways, these are somewhat arbitrary: development is an ongoing process, a real continuum, and what we're doing is picking recognizable moments where we think we see real transitions and highlighting those as significant markers. They can be somewhat fuzzy, although in early development in particular, when the organism is simple, we can…
Greg Laden puts an interesting twist on the question of how many hominin fossils we have: the question should be, "how did they die?". We seem to have evolved from a species that was primarily a prey item on predators' grocery list, to one that succumbed most often to disease, to one where mortality was driven by violence (and now, at least in our prosperous corner of the world, where senescence exacerbated by sloth and gluttony is the common cause of death.)
He's right. The cool questions our students ought to be getting excited about have nothing to do with the nonsense the Discovery…
By way of ScienceBlogling John Lynch, I read that George Gilder calls biologists "Darwinian stormtroopers." In the same NY Times article, John West claims (italics mine):
The [Darwinian] technocrats, he charged, wanted to grab control from "ordinary citizens and their elected representatives" so that they alone could make decisions over "controversial issues such as sex education, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and global warming."
While Gilder and West don't realize it, they have stumbled across our Evil Darwinist Plot:
That's why we want the embryonic…
tags: evolution, religion, streaming video
A brief history of creationism, a streaming video below the fold.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but something Huntington Willard said in that science blogging article published in Cell about how senior scientists have been trained to communicate science got me thinking.
Modern biology (the article was in the biology journal Cell) has made tremendous breakthroughs in the last half century. Yet we have not been that successful in communicating those results to the public. After all, Thursday night, three out of ten Republican candidates for president were not embarrassed to admit that they did not 'believe' in evolution. In fact, it might have…
Believe it or not, the New York Times has decided that it would be appropriate to quote someone making the old "Darwin is responsible for Nazis" canard. Using the pretext of the bizarre scene at the Republican presidential contenders debate the other day, when participants were asked to raise their hands is they didn't believe in evolution, the paper decided to delve more deeply into the alleged connection between Darwin and politics. And in that article we're treated to this little nugget of conservative wisdom:
Skeptics of Darwinism like William F. Buckley, Mr. [John G.] West and Mr. […
Here's an article on The Grandmother Hypothesis. Personally, I didn't take the idea seriously until a biological anthropologist told me that menopause was a tightly integrated proactive cascade of biochemical changes which shuts down female procreative capacity. In contrast, human males exhibit declining fertility in a gradual fashion due to a generalized breakdown of bodily function. I am generally suspicious of some sort of adaptation when something so precise in our physiology seems on the surface to reduce fitness.
Update: Here is an article from the originator of The Grandmother…
tags: evolution, birds, orioles, Icterus, research
"Oriole."
Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells.
[Larger image].
I often think about differences in morphological and behavioral traits in closely-related species and wonder whether the speed and character of changes in these traits reveal anything about the evolutionary relationships between taxa. For example, in birds, both visual and auditory cues, such as plumage and song patterns, are essential for identifying members of their own species. However, these phenomena have rarely been…
Way back in the early 19th century, Geoffroy St. Hilaire argued for a radical idea, that vertebrates and most invertebrates were inverted copies of each other. Vertebrates have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral heart, while an insect has a ventral nerve cord and dorsal heart. Could it be that there was a common plan, and that one difference is simply that one is upside down relative to the other? It was an interesting idea, but it didn't hold up at the time; critics could just enumerate the multitude of differences observable between arthropods and vertebrates and drown out an apparent…