evolution
oracknows | April 20, 2007I'm confused again about what appear to be mutually conflicting statements.
The Discovery Institute's favorite creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor two months ago on Pharyngula:
Perhaps a fable (not a just-so story!) will illustrate. Imagine that you, P.Z., were a student in 1925. You would study Darwinism fairly intensively as a high school student, undergrad, and med student (it's a hypothetical!). In high school you'd read Hunter's 'A Civic Biology' (unless you lived in Dayton, Tennessee), which taught the Darwinian superiority of the Nordic races and the need to eliminate the lesser…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
I sometimes wonder why anyone ever tried to make a living in Australia. Although it is the least wet continent (unless it is an island) on Earth apart from the Antarctic, where they don't grow a lot, Australians have always used water as if they were still living in Britain, or some other well watered place.
We grow rice and cotton, for gods' sakes, in some of the most arid land there is. We water lawns, and use massive amounts of water in industries and domestically. We now use five times as much water as we did back in the 1980s, in dishwashers, showers, swimming pools and toilets. So…
evolvingthoughts | April 18, 2007
Some ideas one might think are pretty clear. The notion of an ancestor is one of them. But I am astounded how few people understand this simple idea in the context of evolution.
Ergo...
The basis for evolutionary thinking is the notion of an evolutionary tree, or a historical genealogy of species. It looks somewhat like the diagram in the header, which is a rendering of the first evolutionary tree from Darwin's Notebooks. One species is the ancestor of another if it is lower in the tree diagram.
That seems simple enough, right? Well ancestry has a few wrinkles.
The first wrinkle is…
jrosenhouse | April 18, 2007In my previous post on this subject, I described the main faults I see in the Mooney/Nisbet thesis regarding the importance of proper “franimg” in presenting science to the public. In this post I would like to focus specifically on their Washington Post article. In particular, I would like to chastise them for some rather ill-considered remarks contained therein.
We start at the beginning of the article:
If the defenders of evolution wanted to give their creationist adversaries a boost, it's hard to see how they could do better than Richard Dawkins, the famed Oxford scientist who had a…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2007tags: cancer, chromosomes, aneuploidy
There is an article about cancer in this month's issue of Scientific American written by pioneering the virologist, Peter Duesberg. For those of you to whom his name sounds vaguely familiar, Duesberg became famous by claiming that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Fortunately, this article does not go into his radical ideas about HIV. Instead, this piece explores his more plausible hypothesis regarding the cause of cancer, which proposes that the source for many cancers is aneuploidy: a condition where the cell's chromosomes are scrambled -- duplicated, broken,…
razib | April 17, 2007The Scientist has some good quotes in a article on the chimp positive selection story from yesterday:
The screen failed to find evidence for positive selection of two genes involved in brain development and cognition - ASPMM and Foxp2 - that studies have previously identified as positively selected genes in the human lineage. Zhang and Lahn agreed that the discrepancy likely results from differences in statistical power between the methods used in the current study and those used in previous work, which also incorporated polymorphism data.
Update: MIT Technology Review has more:
To Zhang's…
zooillogix | April 16, 2007Researchers recently discovered a most unusual parenting method in Boulengerula Taitanus, a blind, worm-like amphibian called a caecilian. It feeds its young by letting them tear off its own skin with hooked white teeth. Scientists say this behavior has never been witnessed in any land-based animal.
Unlike most caecilians, B. Taitanus lays eggs. The skin of the female parent actually becomes thicker and nutrient rich when the eggs are about to hatch, preparing a delicious meal for her cuddly worm-lizard babies. Apparently in live-bearing caecilians, the fetuses feed on the womb-like oviduct…
pharyngula | April 16, 2007
I've finished Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book I've mentioned before and promised, with considerable misgivings, to read thoroughly. I didn't like his ideas, I thought he'd expressed them poorly before, but I'd give his book on the subject a fair shake and see if he could persuade me.
My opinion: it's dreck.
To be fair, I thought there were some improvements. I've long thought that his writing was leaden and clunky, and painful to slog through. I think that in this book he has achieved something of a more tolerable…
oracknows | April 16, 2007...because he's sure as heck doing his best to cause it damage with his latest antievolution "broadsides," even to the point where it needs the loving ministrations of a neurosurgeon! His latest screeds produce in me a nearly irresistible urge to pound my head against the nearest hard surface to make the psychic pain stop. He's placing me in danger of real, physical pain, from epidural hematoma (in fact, I wonder if I'm in the middle of a lucid interval right now) to subdural hematoma to cerebral contusions.
First of all, regular readers may have noted that I haven't yet responded to the…
razib | April 16, 2007 You know a scientist has made it to the "big time" when they are given the opportunity to write to a general audience. Some thinkers, such as Richard Dawkins, have made their name via popularization. Others, such as E.O. Wilson, only became notable figures outside of academia after having established their reputation and stature within science. David Sloan Wilson has taken the latter path. Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives is an ambitious book, as the title should make clear. But just as E.O. Wilson's forays into popularization have…
evolvingthoughts | April 15, 2007
A bunch of topics that I can't be stuffed blogging in detail, but are important:
Larry Arnhart and Roger Scruton, both Darwinians (see previous post) and conservatives, justify the existence of religion as a social cohesive force. I wonder, though, as a Darwinian (see previous post) and a not-conservative, why we can't use the values and rituals of social justice and morality as a cohesive force, especially given that religion can only cohere a society by excluding and marginalising those who disagree with it. That said, we can invert the issue and say that a function of religion is to…
evolvingthoughts | April 14, 2007
For a long time now, I have had troubles with the use of the word "Darwinism". Not just by creationists and antiscience advocates like IDevotees, but by scientists themselves. You routinely see press releases and book titles that declare the death or some fatal illness of Darwinism, which, in every case, their own theoretical or experimental contributions points up. It is time, I think, to lose the word entirely.
The term has a history that is itself confusing and contradictory. Let's consider some of the things it has been used to denote:
1. Transmutation of species
1.1 Gradually (…
pharyngula | April 14, 2007Thank you, Alun Salt, for introducing me to Mark Steel and wonderful lectures on the BBC—enjoy his version of Darwin and evolution, which combines information and humor.
grrlscientist | April 13, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, Tyrannosaurus rex, dinosaurs, birds, fossils
Repeated analysis of proteins from a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex reveal new evidence of a link between dinosaurs and birds: Of the seven reconstructed protein sequences, three were closely related to chickens.
Image: NYTimes
It was once thought impossible to obtain actual soft tissue, such as proteins, from fossils, but the impossible has happened and now, two research teams who published reports in this week's Science describe their findings: the closest relative to the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex is .. a chicken.…
mikethemadbiologist | April 13, 2007While I'm not as bothered by the Pope's statement about evolution as PZ is, what's troubling is the scientific misunderstanding shown by his statements.
I agree with one sentiment, which is that biology doesn't tell us much about meaning, since I think meaning is something we ascribe to physical reality (and events). Many biologists have made much philosophical and ethical hay of the common ancestry of humankind, so it's certainly reasonable for the Pope (or anyone else) to do so. What is really disturbing is how ignorant he is of modern biology and science. According to the Pope:
"The…
grrlscientist | April 12, 2007I hate to say this, but I have often wondered about the future of the human species .. we will certainly keep our technology, but our overall intelligence and ingenuity will diminish, as this video reveals. (clips from the Mike Judge movie, Idiocracy).
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tags: streaming video, evolution, Idiocracy
loom | April 12, 2007Trace your genealogy back 25 million years, and you'll meet long-tailed monkey-like primates living in trees. Those primates were not just the ancestors of ourselves, but of all the other apes--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons--along with the monkeys of the Eastern Hemisphere, such as baboons and langurs. By comparing ourselves to these other primates, scientists can get clues to our evolution over the past 25 million years. Until now, most of those clues have come from fossils and studies on the behavior and physiology of apes and monkeys. But in the past few years…
evolvingthoughts | April 12, 2007
Sometimes life hands you nice ironies and wry humour. The same week that the Pope, Ratzinger-Benedict XVI (don't you hate hyphenated names?) announces that he almost accepts evolution as science, Michael Ghiselin, a rather famous evolutionary biologist and author of the 1969 book The Triumph of the Darwinian Method publishes (in the same journal as my latest, preen, preen) a paper entitled - I kid you not - "Is the Pope a Catholic?"
Ghiselin is making a point about set inclusion in the context of the nature of species, so I won't belabour the pun any further, but Ratzinger's new book…
evolvingthoughts | April 12, 2007
Suppose for a minute that everything the creationists say about evolution were true. Now suppose you had lost your mind... but I repeat myself. What would the history of that ersatz and terrible "science" be?
Wonder no more. Richard Forrest, who claims to be a paleontologist but is clearly a minion of satanic powers, has written the truth history of evilution, in The Truth: Being a TRUE and IMPARTIAL account of the history of that damnable religion, the great EVIL of DARWINISM, also called EVOLUTIONISM and it's attempts to bring the downfall of all moral and TRUE CHRISTIAN ™ virtue. Based…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones. So I thought I'd start blogging them as I find them. Today's suspects are Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (1735-1820) and Pierre Trémaux (1818-1895).
Robinet was one of the last and most comprehensive exponents of the Great Chain of Being. A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner. That most perfect…