evolution
cmooney | February 26, 2007Casey Luskin has now dug into my past and found some secularist credentials from my college days. Apparently he views this as some sort of smoking gun. As he puts it: "Chris Mooney provides a yet another example of the fact that many (though certainly not all, of course) leading Darwinist activists are secular humanists."
Calling me a "leading Darwinist activist" is flattering, but a bit over the top; I haven't really made a significant peep about evolution-related stuff (other than brief asides) in some time. As you may have noticed, I've been on the global warming beat.
Moreover, it's…
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2007
In another interesting piece about demarcation of science from nonscience (see my previous items about this here, here and here), Janet Stemwedel has a nice series of hand-drawn flowcharts that make the difference between creationist arguments and real science clear.
Janet, I would have done nice neat computer-drawn flowcharts for you, if you'd asked...
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2007
As I recently mentioned Grene's book with Depew, it's worth noting an interview with her by The Believer (Benjamin Cohen) here. It explains some of the themes in the book. Thanks to Benjamin for the heads up.
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2007And it's free! Bob Altemeyer, whose work on the authoritarian mind significantly influenced John Dean'sConservatives Without Conscience, has released a free online book, The Authoritarians, which is about, well, authoritarians. Here's an interesting bit from the book about evolution from Ch. 4:
For the record, Darwin never said humans evolved from monkeys, even though many other people besides fundamentalists think he did. Even with the limited knowledge available to him 150 years ago, Darwin realized that humanity's ancestors had long separated from the evolutionary path that led to…
loom | February 23, 2007Loyalty, teamwork, cruel deception: welcome to robot evolution.
Living things communicate all the time. They bark, they glow, they make a stink, they thwack the ground. How their communication evolved is the sort of big question that keeps lots of biologists busy for entire careers. One of the reasons it's so big is that there are many different things that organisms communicate. A frog may sing to attract mates. A plant may give off a chemical to attract parasitoid wasps to attack the bugs chewing its leaves. An ant may lay down pheromone trails to guide other ants to food. Bacteria emit…
clock | February 23, 2007Evolution works according to a very small set of simple rules. If a) there is variation in a trait in a population and b) that variation is heritable and c) one variant is better adapted to the current local environment, then d) the best adapted trait will increase in the proportion within the population in the next generation. Once you understand this simple algorithm (perhaps, for fuller understanding, learn some basics of the ways genotype maps onto phenotype via development), everything about the living world is explainable without magic.
John McCain works according to a very small set…
evolvingthoughts | February 23, 2007
When one is starting in a field for the first time, the choice of textbook is crucial, as it will often set the tone for the rest of one's study. Last year and the year before I helped teach Philosophy of the Life Sciences here, and we used, respectively, one textbook and no textbook. Right now I'm reading a rather marvellous book, that would have set me up years in advance of where I am now, so this got me thinking (it's the job description, you know): what are the textbooks on Philosophy of Biology, and what are their respective merits?
I'm going to ignore the various present and…
grrlscientist | February 22, 2007Did you know that North America had its own species of zebra? Or that there was a wolf-like carnivorous mammal -- with hooves? And there once was a horned rodent whose corkscrew-shaped burrows are still visible today? If this sort of thing interests you then you will enjoy Donald Prothero's book, After the Dinosaurs: The Age of Mammals (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2006).
With the exception of birds, dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago when a giant bolide crashed into the earth just off the Yucatan peninsula. This extinction left thousands of niches open for other…
loom | February 22, 2007There was a time--in the 1960s and 1970s--when the phrase "Man the Hunter" enjoyed a lot of popularity. Some researchers claimed that the evolution of hunting played a key role in the origin of our lineage. That's what we made tools for, and that's how we got all the extra energy to fuel our big brains. Much of our anatomy, according to the Man-the-Hunter theory, was the result of adaptations for hunting. You have to stand tall above the savannah grass, for example, to spot your game. You need to make weapons. And a bloody-minded psychology helped too. In the 1976 book The Hunting Hypothesis…
mikethemadbiologist | February 22, 2007Some of my fellow ScienceBloglings have written about Conservapedia's treatment of evolution. What has always puzzled me about creationists is the rather frequent denial of mutation. For example, in the section on macroevolution, titled "Is the theory of macroevolution true?"*--which should tell you what's to come right away, the entry reads:
2. Differences between organisms can be explained by known mechanisms of genetic mutation.
* Counter: There has not been enough time for mutation to generate existing biological diversity.
* Counter: There has been enough time enough…
pharyngula | February 21, 2007A reader pointed me to this German documentary (with English subtitles) on evolution and creationism—it has a nice 10 minute primer on mechanisms and evidence for evolution (with evo-devo, especially of fruit flies and zebrafish, prominently mentioned, appropriately enough for the country of Christiane Nusslein-Volhard).
There's also a segment on creationism that is a bit lacking in nuance—they are all lumped together as young earth creationists—which is the kind of opening creationists use to disavow association with those other kooks, while glossing over the foolishness they do believe.…
loom | February 21, 2007Behold conservapedia, which calls itself "an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America"--and where we don't like Wikipedia at all. My fellow Sciencebloggers have been finding all sorts of factual troubles with the site over the past few days. I didn't think I had all that much to add, until I started entering a few basic science terms in the search engine and detected a certain pattern...
Geology
The study of the earth's history as revealed in the rocks that make up the earth.[1]
1. Wile, Dr. Jay L. Exploring Creation With General Science. Anderson:…
pharyngula | February 21, 2007The article about gastrulation from the other day was dreadfully vertebrate-centric, so let me correct that with a little addendum that mentions a few invertebrate patterns of gastrulation—and you'll see that the story hasn't changed.
Remember, this is the definition of gastrulation that I explained with some vertebrate examples:
The process in animal embryos in which endoderm and mesoderm move from the outer surface of the embryo to the inside, where they give rise to internal organs.
I described frogs and birds and mammals the other day, so lets take a look at sea urchins and fruit flies…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2007Today, I read a story in the latest issue of New Scientist that discussed how human activities are driving evolution of animals in dramatic and often unexpected ways. In effect, we have turned earth into a large uncontrolled evolutionary laboratory.
Biologists are struggling to understand what is happening although there is no shortage of species that are evolving in response to human interference. For example, chinook salmon in the Snake River are growing smaller and smaller, possibly as the result of dam construction. Additionally, the fish are apparently putting off migration out to sea so…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2007
James Randerson, at the GrauniadGuardian blog site makes an interesting point about the new bionic eye. It's only a 4x4 grid of monochrome pixels, but it's revolutionised the life of a blind man. Of what use is 1/2^n of an eye? Well it's enough to navigate. Randerson points out that this totally demolishes the ID argument. So it's not only a cool invention, but a great rebuttal.
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2007
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the unwritten vow taken by psychologists. From p3 of Stumbling on Happiness (ISBN 9780007183135).
Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an article that contains the sentence: 'The human being is the only animal that...' We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words.
Most of us wait to relatively late in our careers to fulfil this solemn obligation because we know that successive…
jlynch | February 19, 2007I had meant to pimp this earlier but neglected to (bad me!). Flyers at the AAAS reminded me that Evil Monkey recently announced an essay contest sponsored by the Alliance for Science:
2007 National High School Essay Contest
Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? If you are a high school student in the United States, we want to hear your answer to that question. Send us an essay of not more than 1,000 words by March 31st.
There are all sorts of prizes for winners and the details can be found here.
loom | February 19, 2007Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors were ordinary mammals that walked on land with legs. His suggestion was greeted with shock and disbelief; neverthless, scientists have found bones from ancient walking whales. Humans, Darwin argued, evolved from apes, most likely in Africa where chimpanzees and gorillas are found today. And today scientists have found about twenty different…
oracknows | February 19, 2007You know, I'm really tired of this.
I'm tired of my fellow physicians with a penchant for spouting scientifically ignorant "attacks" on or "doubts" about evolution. It embarrasses the hell out of me around ScienceBlogs, and I really wish they would stop it. Sadly, it seems to be an increasingly long list. Although I first noticed it when former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (who is a cardiac surgeon) voiced support for "intelligent design" back in 2005, this tendency among my fellow physicians to pontificate on their distaste for evolution didn't start to irritate me really seriously…