evolution
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
Francis Darwin, that is, son of Charles and editor of his correspondence.
In Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, volume I, Francis reprinted a number of letters of Darwin's on the issue of religious belief, and in a footnote, he noted the following:
Dr. Aveling has published an account of a conversation with my father. I think that the readers of this pamphlet ('The Religious Views of Charles Darwin,' Free Thought Publishing Company, 1883) may be misled into seeing more resemblance than really existed between the positions of my father and Dr. Aveling: and I say this in spite of my…
mikethemadbiologist | April 10, 2007I've mentioned the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) before. Today, I'll be attending the NARMS public hearing which is going to discuss four questions:
1) Why, on this night
1) Are there inherent biases in the sampling strategies employed in NARMS? If so, how can they be improved to ensure that the data and interpretation are scientifically sound given current resources?
2) Are there epidemiological and/or microbiological research studies that would better serve the goals of NARMS and the regulatory work of FDA?
3) Are current plans for data harmonization and…
evolvingthoughts | April 9, 2007
This is a guest post by Carl Bajema, a retired evolutionary biologist, first posted on the Richard Dawkins website on Darwin's birthday.
Happy 198th Birthday Charlie Darwin from Carl Bajema...
Organisms with their intricate adaptations for surviving and reproducing could not have evolved by chance alone. Both creationists and evolutionary biologists agree with this conclusion. Charles Darwin understood that the designs we observe in nature could not have been produced by undirected random processes alone.
Selection was widely understood before Darwin's time to be strictly a negative…
mikethemadbiologist | April 9, 2007From the archives, here's something about how we might be underestimating the strength of natural selection when we look at molecular data:
PZ Myers has a superb summary of a very interesting PLoS paper. In the paper, the authors identify those genes that have experienced strong selection, and thus might be responsible for the chimpanzee-human divergence (PZ Myers has a great summary):
With all the data available from the human genome project and the ongoing chimpanzee genome project, we can start comparing DNA sequences. One parameter that can be assayed is the frequency of synonymous…
oracknows | April 9, 2007In my last couple of posts on the risks and benefits of ever more sensitive screening tests for various cancers, and in particular breast cancer, I marveled at a a bit of serendipity that had pointed me to a particular old article a mere few days before multiple new papers about breast cancer screening with mammography and MRI were released. It turns out that that's not the only serendipity that's been going on lately, as far as blogging goes. For example, there's been Dr. Michael Egnor, the creationist professor of neurosurgery who's become the Discovery Institute's seemingly favorite "…
voltagegate | April 9, 2007Is anyone else biting at the bit to play this game?
I have been following the progress of Sims guru Will Wright in his latest creation, Spore, which attempts to make a game out of evolution.
Life and eventually culture is playable in a succession of phases, which are linked on the timeline of guided development: molecular, cellular, creature, tribal, civilization, terraform and galactic. Wright has incorporated much of his previous projects into Spore, heavy on the SimCity once you hit the tribal phase. More below the fold, including a longer video tutorial.
Development seems to rely on the…
razib | April 7, 2007A few days ago I introduced how higher levels of selection could occur via a "toy" example. Obviously it wasn't realistic, and as RPM pointed out a real population is not open ended in its growth potential. I simply wanted to allude to the seeds of how Simpson's Paradox might occur, where population structure is needed to explain overall trends. Now I'm going to dive into a somewhat more complicated model, one which Martin Nowak published last year in PNAS, Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. The paper is free, so if this post piques your interest I recommend you dive straight…
mikethemadbiologist | April 7, 2007I've just finished reading Chris Mooney's and Matt Nisbet's Science article about communicating science to the general public. It's right on target.
When it comes to defending evolutionary biology, the success one will have is far less dependent on marshalling the appropriate facts than many scientists would like. Since the Scopes trial 80 years ago, the evidence in favor of evolution has only increased--one discpline that supports it, genetics, was in its infancy, and another, molecular evolution/population genetics, didn't even exist. Yet we don't really seem to have made a dent, if…
razib | April 7, 2007David Sloan Wilson, the doyen of Multilevel Selection theorists, has a new book out, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. It seems pretty clear to me that Wilson is trying to "do a Dennett" here. But unlike Dennett, who was not a scientist himself and so operated within standard evolutionary science by regurgitating Richard Dawkins' work (who was himself simply a channel for W.D. Hamilton and John Maynard Smith), Wilson is known to be something of a heterodox figure because of his emphasis upon higher levels of selection than the…
clock | April 6, 2007My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science"
Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford (also check the comments here), John Fleck, Larry Moran, Dietram Scheufele, Kristina Chew, Randy Olson, James Hrynyshyn, Paul Sunstone and Alan Boyle have, so far, responded and their responses (and the comment threads) are worth your time to read. Chris and Matt respond to some of them. Matt has more in-depth explanations here, here and…
evolgen | April 6, 2007GAME PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER
Yesterday's game between Corporate and Charles Darwin was a battle between free market capitalism and the greatest naturalist of all time. The Corporate team is loaded with the world's top pharmaceutical and chemical companies. Darwin is the author of important works such as On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. To find out who came out on top, click through below the fold.
Everyone expected Darwin to start out with a heavy dose of the Origin. And if he didn't come heavy with that, he'd bring The Descent of Man. But Chuck use neither in the opening…
clock | April 5, 20072007 TED Prize winner E.O. Wilson on TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks:
As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; and yet we're steadily, methodically, vigorously destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of…
pharyngula | April 5, 2007A hagfish egg with a 14.3-mm pharyngula-stage embryo inside (arrows). Scale bar, 5 mm.
I've been looking forward to seeing these little jewels in print since I saw Kuratani talk about them at the SICB meetings in January. Hagfish are wonderfully slimy jawless chordates that have been difficult to raise in the lab—although if you poke a whale corpse rotting in the cold deeps you'll find them swarming everywhere. The Kuratani lab has managed to keep animals of the species Eptatretus burgeri alive and healthy in a lab aquarium maintained at cold temperatures (16°C), and has even had success in…
clock | April 5, 2007I think I will show this in class in May when I teach the evolution lecture again.
Reed adds some caveats I am sure to point out in the classroom.
Update: Watched it again. I think I'll stop the movie a moment before the first chimp appears. Until that moment the animation, though not 100% accurate, and quite oversimplified, is GREAT for a visceral understanding of evolution. We can debate neutral selection and population sizes, but that is what we do. For a regular citizen uninterested in science, this brief movie is sufficient to "grok" evolution. This is a great example of "visual…
mikethemadbiologist | April 5, 2007From the archives comes this bit about the ludicrous (and willful) misunderstanding that creationists have regarding 'beneficial' mutations:
Whether they are young earthers or intelligent design advocates, one tactic creationists use is to claim evolutionary biologists-always described as "evolutionists"-think something which we do not. Over at Thoughts from Kansas, Josh had a very nice post describing the mechanisms by which mutations happen (among other things). Without fail, in charged a creationist:
The evolutionists make the claim that there are enough mutations that turn out to be…
razib | April 5, 2007I'm rereading Unto Others, David Wilson and Elliott Sober's argument for Multilevel Selection. One of the core planks in the book is that supra-individual levels of selection are necessary for the evolution of altruism, and much of the book details what Wilson & Sober perceive are the stretched and implausible explanations that scientists who are straight-jacketed into individual selection need to concoct. So how can selection between groups lead to the emergence of altruism?
Consider two groups:
Mixed & Selfish
Assume that both groups begin in generation 1 with 100 individuals.…
grrlscientist | April 4, 2007This is a very cute video that shows evolution .. I was a little surprised to see that Homer evolved into a human.
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tags: streaming video, Simpsons, evolution
oracknows | April 4, 2007Well, well, well, well.
I hadn't expected it. I really hadn't. After just shy of three weeks since I first made my challenge to Dr. Egnor to put up or shut up regarding certain claims of his that the "design inference" has been "of great value" in medicine and results in "the best medical research," I had pretty much given up trying to get an answer out of him. I had come to assume that either (1) Dr. Egnor had been either unaware of my challenge (although I tended to doubt it, given how many echoed it, or (2) he was simply ignoring it in favor of posting some amazingly bad reasoning. To…
pharyngula | April 3, 2007This evening, I am watching an episode of that marvelous and profane Western, Deadwood, as I type this; it is a most excellently compensatory distraction, allowing me to sublimate my urge to express myself in uncompromisingly vulgar terms on Pharyngula. This is an essential coping mechanism.
I have been reading Jonathan Wells again.
If you're familiar with Wells and with Deadwood, you know what I mean. You'll just have to imagine that I am Al Swearingen, the brutal bar-owner who uses obscenities as if they were lyric poetry, while Wells is E.B. Farnum, the unctuous rodent who earns the…
oracknows | April 3, 2007One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…