evolution
sa smith | August 12, 2011YAAAAAAAAAY!!!
A *big* "THANK YOU!!" to The Thinking Atheist for recording and producing these videos (all of the speeches will be up on his YouTube channel). He brought all the equipment, the audio is great, the video is great, he integrated in the slides from my PowerPoint, dealt with uploading everything to YouTube (I know thats a headache), and on top of it all, he was a super sweet guy. And youll be able to see that for yourself when his speech gets uploaded!!
THANK YOU!!!
pharyngula | August 11, 2011Isn't it obvious that the story of Planet of the Apes is about apes from one planet dominated by apes finding themselves on a planet dominated by apes of a slightly different species?
Also, this comic bugs me a little bit: I'm flying off to give a talk in which I argue that the hallmark of human evolution isn't brutality and conquest, but cooperation.
(Also on FtB)
sa smith | August 10, 2011Obviously, my first post on Antibodies: Evolution in action isnt the whole story, cause otherwise we would only have... like... eight different antibodies...
:-/
Thats obviously not the case.
Weve got lots and lots and lots of antibodies that recognize lots and lots and lots of different things!
Kevin has a post up at We Beasties on some of the initial stages of antibody development, V-(D)-J recombination!
Quick summary (GO READ HIS POST DONT READ JUST READ MY TWO SENTENCE SUMMARY!): A basic 'antibody' is composed of two heavy chains (blue) and two light chains (red) to make that 'Y' shape…
pharyngula | August 4, 2011This is an excellent comic at Abstruse Goose that illustrates the depth of our evolutionary history. The ending is a downer, though; shouldn't the protagonist have been enlightened and encouraged by this information?
pharyngula | August 3, 2011Larry Moran went crazy and has created the largest Carnival of Evolution ever. There is so much good stuff in there…and I'm annoyed that the creationists are staying away by the legion. It's all evidence and data and science, which are apparently toxic to them.
sa smith | August 1, 2011I did a little experiment on the audience at FreeOK on Saturday (will be posted when The Thinking Atheist gets it up! Should be good quality, hes got all kinds of fancy stuff/tricks!).
*squint*
It wasnt really a matter of 'will they get this?', cause atheists/skeptics/freethinkers are smart.
It was more of 'will they even like this?'
I *think* the answer to my experiment is "People kinda think this is cool!"
So Im gonna roll with it with you all-- A series of posts connecting evolution (something a lot of skeptics are freaking amateur experts on) and immunology (scary) and the science of…
pharyngula | August 1, 2011I told you all the batty creationists were crawling out of the woodwork to crow over Xiaotingia's redefinition of Archaeopteryx's status as a victory for their ideology, when it really isn't. Now another has joined the fray: Vox Day, creationist and right-wing lunatic. He makes a lot of crazy, ignorant claims in this short passage that I'll answer one by one.
Precisely when has any evolutionist reconsidered either a) the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection1 or b) the corollary and requisite hypothesis that life evolved from non-life2, as a…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2011Your required reading for today is Jerry Coyne's essay in the USA Today. His topic? Where morality comes from if not from God. Here's an excerpt:
So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing -- even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is…
pharyngula | July 28, 2011A lovely new dinosaur fossil from China is described in Nature today: it's named Xiaotingia zhengi, and it was a small chicken-sized, feathered, Archaeopteryx-like beast that lived about 155 million years ago. It shares some features with Archaeopteryx, and also with some other feathered dinosaurs.
(Click for larger image)a, b, Photograph (a) and line drawing (b). Integumentary structures in b are coloured grey. cav, caudal vertebra; cv, cervical vertebra; dv, dorsal vertebra; fu, furcula; lc, left coracoid; lfe, left femur; lh, left humerus; li, left ilium; lis, left ischium; lm, left manus…
tfk | July 26, 2011In discussing the National Science Board's latest stand on whether to report evolution literacy, and how to do so, I didn't get into the details of Jon Miller's concerns. Chris Mooney quotes that passage from the Science report, and raises some concerns.
Science reported that the NSB will, in the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators, report results of two questions: the standard true/false "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals" and another version in which people are asked "according to evolutionary theory, human beingsâ¦." An experiment with that…
tfk | July 26, 2011A bit over a year ago, we reported on the removal of evolution from a report by the NSF's governing body, the National Science Board. The NSB is presidentially appointed and Senate confirmed, and sets broad policy for the NSF. Every other year, it publishes a report on Science and Engineering Indicators for the nation, and Chapter 7's discussion of public science literacy is what I always look at first. I was surprised to find evolution absent from the 2010 edition, and sleuthing by NCSE and others resulted in a report in Science magazine, that revealed some disturbing attitudes.
Most…
jrosenhouse | July 24, 2011Be sure to read Josh Rosenau's account of the goings-on with the Texas School Board. Josh was in town to testify on behalf of sunshine and puppies. Here's an excerpt:
The best thing about the day was the stories of scientists, and nonscientists who've been touched by science. There was a grad student at UT (who I'd met at Netroots Nation last month) who is working on finding cures for cancer. The techniques he uses, he explained, rely heavily on understanding the shared ancestry of plants and animals. Indeed, he said, his research on cancer cures “would not work if not for evolution.” He…
sa smith | July 21, 2011I suck! Desiree Schelle has been trying to get me on Skeptically Speaking since, like, last December, and I keep getting busy and putting it off and then I was like "GHA I SUCK NAME A DATE!"
So Im going to be on her show this Sunday to talk about HIV-1!
We record live with Abbie Smith on Sunday, July 24 at 6 pm MT. The podcast will be available to download at 9 pm MT on Friday, July 29.
And theeeen, after some scheduling rearrangements, Im actually going to get to speak July 30th at the inaugural conference for Oklahoma skeptics and freethinkers, FreeOK! Its $10 for a day of speakers:
AND…
sa smith | July 20, 2011The simplest, simplest definition of evilution: Change over time.
Your children are different from you. You are different from your parents. Your parents are different from their parents. And so on and so on and so on.
But if Person A is older than you and has different DNA, that doesnt automatically mean Person A is one of your parents. If Person B is younger than you and has different DNA, that doesnt automatically mean Person B is your child.
You might think the above statement is obvious, but that is precisely the faulty reasoning used in a previous publication on XMTV/MLV-like/…
pharyngula | July 16, 2011OK, I'm feeling guilty: I'm off at The Amaz!ng Meeting enjoying myself, and totally neglecting the blog readers who aren't lucky enough to be here too. And since I've been getting lots of requests to put the full content of my talk online, I figured…yeah, sure, I can do that. So here you go, all of the slides and what I said about them, mostly, below the fold. Criticize and argue and do your usual.
TAM is a tough crowd for me: it's a meeting where the emphasis is always on the space sciences, especially this year with a theme that just crows about astronomy, and I'm a biologist. It doesn't…
tfk | July 15, 2011Remember when I invited readers to take a survey on the Miss USA evolution answers? And I was kinda vague about why I was doing it? At last it can be told, I was working on a guest blog post at Scientific American. You should read the whole thing, but here's the bit about how I used the survey data:
Watching the video and reading the transcript, it is obvious that many contestants were conflicted in their views, and quite a few had to discover their views on the spot. Instead of mocking these women for struggling with the issue, it should be said that most Americans probably go through a…
pharyngula | July 15, 2011I just gave my talk at TAM on likely paths of alien evolution (my conclusion: humanoids are extraordinarily unlikely), and there was one awkward bit I have to fix.
Here's the problem: these were short talks, only a half hour long, so I designed it so there were some optional bits I'd only get to if time allowed, and I also had a couple of places where I could naturally bring it to a close if I ran over time. I was not able to show the last two slides I'd prepared, which was OK, I was ready for that. However, when we were setting up, the technician accidentally flashed the very last slide to…
milhayser | July 15, 2011
On Dean's Corner, Jeffrey Toney reports the winners of Google's first Science Fair, and in all age groups the winner was a girl. They researched some very challenging and relevant topics: Lauren "studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken," Naomi "endeavored to prove that making changes to indoor environments that improve indoor air quality can reduce people's reliance on asthma medications," and Shree "discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain…
tfk | July 14, 2011I'm here in Las Vegas, and already my work is done. Genie Scott, Occidental College's Don Prothero, and I did a workshop at 9am today about Defending Evolution in Classrooms.
Planning for this was complicated, because we wanted it to be a true workshop, i.e., to have interactive aspects, and time for people to work through exercises in small groups. But we didn't know what sort of crowd to expect for the first workshop of the first day. Chatting about our plan, we joked about how embarrassing it'd be if only 3 people showed up, but we planned for about 30, and made 60 copies of the…
tfk | July 12, 2011
It was a hard job, but someone had to do it. A few days ago, I sat down and watched a 15 minute video of Miss USA pageant contestants as they pondered the question: Should evolution be taught in schools?
Then I watched it again. And again. Until my eardrums bled I had a complete and accurate transcript.
So that you don't have to do endure the same agony, I present the transcript below, as a service to the community, with timecodes relative to the video above. Enjoy. You can find the names and biographies of each state's contestant at the Miss USA site.
"Should evolution be taught in…