evolution
evolvingthoughts | March 12, 2007
I am idly wondering what the best creationist book ever was. Not what best puts the usual creationist canards forward, but which creationist (including ID) book tried to make an intellectually satisfying and honest case.
So far I have Wendell Bird's Origin of Species Revisited published about 1983 or so, which was the defendant's brief in McLean v Arkansas. Of course, it's by a lawyer, which doesn't bode all that well. And pretty much anything by Phillip Johnson is suspect for the same reason. But I'm curious. Anyone?
evolvingthoughts | March 11, 2007
I have put a file on my home site that lists as many species definitions, from Aristotle to today, as I can find. It's a work in progress, so if you find any that are significant in the history of biology or the present debate that I have missed, please let me know. In time, this may become a reader published somewhere. [It's a 1.3Mb PDF]
pharyngula | March 11, 2007
I was reminded of one of the more comical, but persistent misconceptions by creationists in a thread on Internet Infidels, on The Coelacanth. Try doing a google search for “coelacanth creation" and be amazed at the volume of ignorance pumped out on this subject. I've also run across a more recent example of the misrepresentation of the coelacanth that I'll mention later … this poor fish has a long history of abuse by creationists, though, so here's a brief rundown of wacky creationist interpretations.
Crystal Clear Creation: Unlock the secrets of nature, wildlife, the world, from a…
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2007
This is a repost of a piece I wrote for The Panda's Thumb in March 2004. I add it here to put it in the Basics series.
It is, wrote the Roman poet Horace, fit and proper to die for one's homeland. The word he used for homeland was "patria" (dulce et decorum est pro patria mori), and the word has entered into biology as the suffix for exactly that. Unlike Horace's slogan, though, it applies more to living than dying. It would be nice if we humans could attempt to live for our homelands rather than die for them, but that's another rant for another time.
There are a cluster of terms used…
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2007
Migrations has this wonderful image of the structure of a yeast cell done by EMBL through electron tomography. You can even see the cytoskeleton.
Below the fold:
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2007
A common attack upon evolutionary biology, from ranking clerics in the Catholic church to the meanest creationist blogger, is that it implies that life arose and came to result in us by accident. We are asked to believe, they say, that three billion years led to us as a series of accidents. No matter how often evolutionary biologists and informed respondents try to point out that the sense of "accident" in biology is based on the lack of correlation between the future needs of organisms, the trope is repeated ad nauseum.
Why?
The reason is deep in the history of western thought. In…
mikethemadbiologist | March 10, 2007One of the little things I liked about Rick Weiss' cefquinome article was a diagram about how antibiotic resistant strains evolve.
One of the confusing things about the evolution of resistance (and natural selection, for that matter) is the notion that the evolution of resistance happens among individuals within populations. This graphic from the Washington Post lays that out quite nicely:
It might be good for students too.
grrlscientist | March 9, 2007
Scientists believe they have figured out how and why the human pubic louse, right, and the gorilla louse, left, diverged 3.3 million years ago.
Unlike most other primates, which play host to only one species of louse, humans provide a home to three species of lice. Even more interesting, the closest relative of the human pubic louse is the gorilla louse.
Each of these three species of human louse occupy a different niche on the human body. The head louse, Pediculus humanus, lives among the fine hairs on the scalp as its name implies. Its cousin, the body louse, doesn't live on the body,…
evolvingthoughts | March 9, 2007
Aristotle said that for any well-defined topic, there has to be an object of study. What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically measure, experiment with, and model. What we must study is the religions themselves.
There appear to be several phenomena that fall under the rubric of "religion".
First, and this is, I believe, a matter of our western-centric history, religion is defined as an experience. Various folk have held…
jrosenhouse | March 8, 2007With all the fuss lately about the atheistic books of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, it is easy to overlook another glut of books that tend to threaten religion. I am referring to the series of books intending to provide a scientific basis for the prevalence of religious belief.
Examples of the genre include Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained and Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust. In each case the idea is to show that a propensity for religious belief is the result of evolution by natural selection.
This week's New York Times Magazine featured this cover…
oracknows | March 8, 2007...That all around evolution-ignorant but nonetheless eager lapdog of the Discovery Institute, SUNY Stonybrook Professor of Neurosurgery Dr. Michael Egnor, is back.
Rats. I thought that the utter drubbing he took at the hands of myself and my fellow ScienceBloggers (in particular PZ Myers) might have given him the message that he needs to lay low for a while. Apparently not. I guess he must have the monumental ego that more than a few neurosurgeons are famous for. (After all, it takes supreme confidence in one's own abilities to be able to cut into the human brain and believe that the patient…
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2007Or maybe terrifying is a better word. I just returned from the Network on Antimicrobial Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus meeting, where I learned some very interesting things about S. aureus (since I'm going to refer to MRSA, methicillin resistant S. aureus repeatedly, go check this link if you want to know more about MRSA):
1) 43% of all skin infections in the U.S. are the result of one strain of MRSA. Not 43% of staphylococcal infections. All skin infections.
2) According to the NHANES study, the number of people who carry S. aureus asymptomatically (in other words, it lives up your…
evolvingthoughts | March 7, 2007
Once upon a time, there was a village that lived on the side of a large mountain. Just above them was a cloud cover that never moved, obscuring what lay above. Below them were dotted many other villages all the way down to the bottom of the valley.
The villagers did not know where they came from. Well, that is not quite right, for there were two opposing schools of thought, both of whom said they knew. One group, the Ascenders, said they came from the villages below, or trekked past them from the valley, where there were many other groups, some quite similar in their languages, dress and…
loom | March 7, 2007 If pubic lice are not the sort of thing you want to be seen reading about, let me give you the opportunity to close your browser window right now. But if you're at all curious about the secret that pubic lice have been keeping for over three million years, the tale of a mysterious liaison between our ancestors and the ancestors of gorillas--read on.
Many parasites tend to stick close to their hosts. A parasitic wasp may wander through forests and fields to find a caterpillar from a single species of butterfly in which it will lay its eggs. Blood flukes taste the water of their ponds for…
pharyngula | March 7, 2007Here's a nicely focused blog: R. Ford Denison, of the UM Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, has a new blog titled This Week in Evolution, and he's planning to put up one post each week summarizing a recently published paper in evolutionary biology. He has specific criteria:
Each week, I plan to discuss a scientific paper that meets the following criteria:
published during the previous month;
about some aspect of evolution;
published after peer review in a journal with a citation impact of at least 1.0 (i.e., no third-tier journals);
containing significant amounts of data, not…
evolvingthoughts | March 6, 2007
New research indicates that "crabs", or pubic lice, began to evolutionarily diverge after human-leading lineages and gorilla-leading lineages split. As there are very few ways to spread public lice, it suggests that there was some hominid-on-gorilloid action after speciation.
Eww, you might think. But this is to be expected in evolutionary terms. If it wasn't a case involving us or our near relatives, we'd say, "sigh... yet another case of divergent species occasionally doing the nasty". For instance, ducks, which have a deep evolutionary history, will often hybridise. Even if the two…
loom | March 6, 2007Josh at Thoughts from Kansas makes some good points today about the need for more systematists (scientists who describe new species), launching his musings from an article in today's New York Times about the remarkable Eastern Arc mountains by...d'oh! That was by me. Man, I have got to do a better job of staying ahead of the blogging curve.
oracknows | March 5, 2007Sorry I'm a bit late on this. (Yes, I know that Tara and John pimped this contest nearly a month ago, but somehow it slipped by me to mention it myself; that is, until Skepchick reminded me of it as I caught up on my blog reading over the weekend.
If you've read my Medicine and Evolution series, you'll know I'd be interested in this contest. From the Alliance for Science, it is an essay contest for high school students. The topic is Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? They're asking for an essay of 1,000 words or less, and the due date is March 31. Official rules are here.…
purepedantry | March 5, 2007The NYTimes magazine has an excellent article on the controversy within science as to the meaning of God. This is different from the cultural controversy as to the validity of Revelation because it is concerned with why religion may have evolved as opposed to whether it evolved.
Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2007...high levels of resistance to cephalosporins and beta-lactam antibiotics are sure to follow. Sunday, the Washington Post covered the FDA approval of the use of cefquinome in cattle to treat respiratory pneumonia. The article provides a pretty good synopsis of what happened, so I won't summarize the whole thing, but this decision represents a complete corruption of the regulatory process by industry. It's that simple.
Here's why cefquinome use in agriculture is really stupid: bacteria that evolve resistance to cefquinome, also become resistant to cefepime, a vital drug in the treatment…