evolution
razib | November 19, 2006Newsweek has a summation of the recent Neandertal papers. Nothing special, but a good reading of the public Zeitgeist.
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2006Some time back, I was doing driving duty for a conference of philosophers (that's the collective noun; another is a dispute of philosophers) on a skin diving trip, and one of my passengers was Jonathon Kaplan (actually, if I'd crashed and killed us all, a large swathe would have been cut through the philosophy of biology, not including me). Jon was talking about adaptive landscapes and the work of Sergey Gavrilets, who proposes that in a realistic view of adaptive landscapes with thousands of alleles there will be hyperplanes of high fitness connecting nearly all regions of genome space. This…
mikethemadbiologist | November 19, 2006One of the maddening things about the creationists is that they are rarely forthright about their agenda. Euphimisms like "teach the controversy" and "fairness" abound.
This leads to a lot of support that would not exist were their true agenda to be placed front-and-center. Amanda points out, in an excellent post on the pregnancy-as-punishment anti-abortion right, how this also applies to the abortion debate (an aside: why is evolution a 'controversy', but abortion a 'debate'? Does that mean anything?):
Liberals make the whole thing worse by being obtuse about how the anti-choice movement…
evolgen | November 19, 2006Like a lot of evolutionary biologists not studying the root of the tree of life, I assumed the three domain hypothesis was fairly well supported by the research community. This model posits that the tree of life can be broken up into three taxa at its most basal level: eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea. It's the hypothesized evolutionary relationships of these taxa that caused researchers to break the tree of life into three domains.
It turns out the three domain model isn't as supported as many of us assume. Larry Moran put me in my place, pointing out arguments against the three domain…
jlynch | November 17, 2006Larry Moran says it well:
I am not a Darwinist, just as most of my colleagues in the Department of Physics are not Newtonists, and most of my friends who study genetics are not Mendelists. All three of these terms refer to the ideas of famous men (Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel) who made enormous contributions to science. But in all three cases, the modern sciences have advanced well beyond anything envisaged by their founders.
Call me an evolutionary biologist.
Darwin's genius was to provide the first workable naturalistic mechanism for evolution (that is, natural selection).…
loom | November 16, 2006The Discovery Institute has fired a second post at me and my National Geographic article on evolution. I've updated my post to explain why they're shooting blanks.
In the comment thread, some people asked why I was wasting time dealing with this stuff. The reason is simple: if I don't show why these attacks are baseless, some people may assume there's some truth to them. And since I put a fair amount of work into this article, I want to do my part to set things straight. Since the Discovery Institute does not see fit to put a comment thread on their "Evolution News and Views" site, this is…
mikethemadbiologist | November 16, 2006A few weeks ago, an FDA expert panel by a vote of 6-4 decided against the approval of the use of the antibiotic cefquinome in cattle. Unfortunately, I've heard through the grapevine that the political appointees at the FDA plan to overrule the expert panel and approve the use of cefquinome. The chairman of the panel is under pressure to alter the panel's findings, and the FDA has not posted the minutes of the meeting, which is apparently required by law.
About the post title: cefepime, like cefquinome, is what is known as a fourth-generation cephalosporin antibiotic. While cefquinome is…
razib | November 16, 2006More Neandertal news, as promised!
John Hawks is getting so much traffic that his site is getting bogged down. Anyway, he posts on the two studies that came out on Neandertal genomic sequencing. No big news, Neandertals are very different, and there isn't a great deal of evidence for mixing resulting in a large load of Neandertal derived genes in modern populations. RPM has more. At my other blog p-ter excises an important point:
[T]his high level of derived alleles in the Neanderthal is incompatible with the simple population split model estimated in the previous section, given split times…
scientificactivist | November 16, 2006Living successfully with other people demands sacrifice. From going out of your way to pick your little brother up from school to paying taxes toward government health care programs, there is an expectation in any society that its members will sacrifice some personal gain for the greater good. This cooperation, in turn, contributes to a stronger and more successful society, the benefits of which should be felt by all of its members. This is true not just for humans, but for some other animals and, most notably, colony-forming insects. Even there, though, the picture isn't so simple, and a…
evolgen | November 15, 2006Nature has published a correspondence from Maciej Giertych, a Polish biologist, defending his view that evolutionary biology is bullshit. He's actually striking back at Nature for this news item on creationism in Poland. Long story short, the League of Polish Families (LPR), a group led by Roman Giertych (Maciej Giertych's son), has been pushing for the inclusion of creationism in the science curriculum of Polish schools. Maciej Giertych did not like how he and his fellow creationists were portrayed in the Nature article. He decided to defend himself in a letter to Nature, despite the fact…
pharyngula | November 15, 2006
Ian Musgrave has just posted an excellent article on the poor design of the vertebrate eye compared to the cephalopod eye; it's very thorough, and explains how the clumsy organization of the eye clearly indicates that it is the product of an evolutionary process rather than of any kind of intelligent design. A while back, Russ Fernald of Stanford University published a fine review of eye evolution that summarizes another part of the evolution argument: it's not just that the eye has awkward 'design' features that are best explained by contingent and developmental processes, but that the…
razib | November 14, 2006Ancient Crash, Epic Wave is a story in The New York Times about an enormous impact 4,800 years which might have had world-wide repercussions:
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
...
The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world's population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami…
clock | November 14, 2006Michael Shermer has an interview in the latest American Scientist on Creationism and his new book Why Darwin Matters.
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2006
So, in an obvious case of Scibling Rivalry, Jason Rosenhouse has taken me to task about my comments on Dawkins and agnosticism. Indeed, I have been fisked. Obviously one can decide about whether God exists or not, and agnostics are just inadequate atheists...
Let's set the scene with some philosophical definitions. A scientific question is one that evidence can tell for or against. All else is a philosophical question, or as it is popularly known, navel gazing. What is at issue here is whether or not evidence can tell for or against the notion that God exists. Atheists (and theists) say…
pharyngula | November 13, 2006
Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week's issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I'm late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn't just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin…
loom | November 13, 2006Things have not been going so well on the political front for the advocates of intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). This election season their allies on state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio went down to defeat. On the scientific front, things have never really gone well. The Discovery Institute in Seattle claims that it has spent millions on research. They have precious little to show for it. As I wrote last year, a single evolutionary biologist produces more papers in peer-reviewed biology journals than the entire staff of the Discovery Institute. You'd be hard-…
pharyngula | November 11, 2006My day was spent in the Twin Cities attending the inaugural public meeting of the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education (MnCSE), and I can safely say now that Science Education Saturday was a phenomenal success: a good turnout, two top-notch talks, a stimulating panel discussion, and an involved audience that asked lots of good questions. You should have been there! I expect that, with the good response we got today, that there will be future opportunities to attend MnCSE events.
I'll just give a brief summary of the main points from the two talks today. I understand that outlines or…
pharyngula | November 11, 2006I'm ensconced in a comfy chair at the Bell Museum, waiting for the MnCSE Science Education Saturday meeting to start. I'll take notes and be sure to put up a summary later today.
It's not too late to come on down!
terrasig | November 10, 2006While sitting at Chez Pharmboi tonight preparing the belated Friday Fermentable, I picked up our Nov 2006 issue of National Geographic. Therein, is a superbly-written, photographically-dense article by SciBling colleague, Carl Zimmer, entitled, "A Fin is a Limb is a Wing: How Evolution Fashioned Its Masterworks."
The web link provides the text and photo gallery, taken by Rosamond Purcell, but the print edition is worth the price of admission. The story on the complexity of eye development and the conservation of Antennapedia from Drosophila to Hox c6 in vertebrates comes to life in the…