evolution
evolvingthoughts | October 18, 2006
National Geographic are reporting on a new fossil fish found in West Australia, which has some tantalising intermediate forms between ordinary fish and air breathers. It seems that Gogonasus (the Inspector Gadget of evolution?) had precursors to the Eustachian tube and the inner ear, and also had nostrils of an air breather. It also had robust fins, with the homologous bones of a land dwelling tetrapod. Although it is unlikely to have gone on land, it fills in a gap nicely between sea and land dwellers like Tiktalik.
evolvingthoughts | October 18, 2006
Well, Stranger Fruit beat me to it (after I told him about it!) but there's a new version of Darwin's works online that has many juicy goodnesses, such as the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin. Now we can check if these creationists are quoting properly. It has images as well as OCR'd text, and some of these editions were scanned from the Darwin family's own library. Also, there are field notebooks and lots of other stuff.
An OBE for John Van Wyhe, I say...
evolvingthoughts | October 18, 2006A nice interview with Dawkins at BeliefNet, in which he says what we have always known but which antievolutionists like to gloss over:
Is atheism the logical extension of believing in evolution?
They clearly can't be irrevocably linked because a very large number of theologians believe in evolution. In fact, any respectable theologian of the Catholic or Anglican or any other sensible church believes in evolution. Similarly, a very large number of evolutionary scientists are also religious. My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
All those who continually say…
mikethemadbiologist | October 18, 2006By day, I work for an organization that combats the spread of antibiotic resistant microorganisms. One source of antibiotic resistance is the misuse of antibiotics by patients. Often patients will stop using antibiotics early because they feel better. Not only does this make it more likely that the treatment will fail, but the bacterium has been exposed to a lower dose of antibiotics, selecting for 'intermediately' resistant organisms, which is often the first evolutionary step towards therapeutic resistance (i.e., the antibiotic won't work against these organisms).
But reading the…
loom | October 18, 2006Flowers, flagella, feathers. Life is rife with complex features--structures and systems made up of many interacting parts. National Geographic magazine asked me to take a tour of complexity in life and report on the latest research on how it evolved. What struck me over and over again was how scientists studying everything from bacteria to humans are drawn back to the same concepts--making new copies of old parts, for example, or borrowing parts of one complex trait to evolve a new one. And in each case, complexity opens up the way to diversity, because something many parts can be rearranged…
evolvingthoughts | October 18, 2006It seems that we do see colours the same, despite cultural differences. [The spelling of "colour" is not a universal, though, as Americans don't know how to spell it properly.]
From Abidji to English to Zapoteco, the perception and naming of color is remarkably consistent in the world's languages.
Across cultures, people tend to classify hundreds of different chromatic colors into eight distinct categories: red, green, yellow-or-orange, blue, purple, brown, pink and grue (green-or-blue), say researchers in this week's online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…
pharyngula | October 18, 2006Human X (left) and Y (right) chromosomes
Did the internet get stupider while I was away this past week? I mean, it's gratifying to my ego to imagine the average IQ of the virtual collective plummeting when I take some time off, but I really can't believe I personally have this much influence. Maybe the kooks crept out in my absence, or maybe it was just the accumulation of a week's worth of insanity that I saw in one painful blort when I was catching up.
What triggers such cynicism is the combination of Deepak Chopra, Oliver Curry, and now,
William Tucker. Tucker wrote a remarkably silly…
evolgen | October 18, 2006I need to vent . . .
I'm sick and tired of people referring to "higher" and "lower" eukaryotes. And, while I'm at it, I'm also sick of people mixing up "homology", "identity" and "similarity". This is nothing new; I've just reached a point where I need to write it down for the world to see.
First, the 'higher' eukaryotes thing. Measured how? Most people mean animals when they talk about 'higher' eukaryotes. Some are also referring to plants, I think. But I'm not sure, and that's the first problem: it's a meaningless term. Refer to clades and save us all some time and angst. Second, if both…
loom | October 18, 2006This fall we've had some rude visitors out by the front door. One morning a strangely foul smell wafted through the windows. When we looked outside for a dead animal, we found nothing. But we noticed some downright obscene growths foisting themselves out of the flower beds. Thus I got my first introduction to the stinkhorn.
Stinkhorns are pornographic mushrooms. They form large underground webs of threads, which feed on dead and dying plant matter. At scattered points in the stinkhorn network, white rubbery spheres grow. Inside each of them is a pre-formed stinkhorn, which can then spring…
stcynic | October 18, 2006Remember that webpage I spent some time fisking the other day with the bad anti-evolution arguments? Well some of my readers went over there and engaged the writers directly and boy are they getting the runaround. The hand-waving is rather fascinating to watch. For instance, Rich Hughes gave a couple of rather detailed posts disproving specific claims made in the post and the Bill Tingley replied:
You can go all day long about why you think Darwinism explains everything and Intelligent Design explains nothing. The point of my article still eludes you.
No, Bill, the facts still elude you. For…
oracknows | October 18, 2006Due to long delays because of rain on the East Coast that resulted in an air traffic delay and a lot of hanging out for hours at O'Hare airport waiting for the delay to be lifted, I never managed to write anything for today. (I was tempted to spend the $6.95 for wireless while waiting around. Unfortunately, the wireless in the part of O'Hare where I was stranded had a really weak and fluctuating signal. I couldn't even manage to get it to accept my credit card information, and thus decided to bail on that idea.) By the time I got back, it was late, and I was way too exhausted to write…
razib | October 18, 2006I really enjoyed The Long Summer by Brian Fagan. It's a pretty interesting and multi-dimensional story, hitting all the evolutionary, archeological and climatological angles that you'd expect. Fagan's central hypothesis is that our species has been responding to local climatic shocks with short-term strategies1 to buffer our societies against these ups and downs, but the tradeoff has been of possible massive catastrophic effects when hit by a major oscillation. Fagan points to several civilizational collapses which might have been triggered by climatic changes (the Mayan is the most famous…
evolvingthoughts | October 17, 2006There's a really really dumb article getting a lot of attention in the media about the future of human evolution. Razib has a deprecating post about it, but I thought I'd add my two Australian cents (=0.006 US cents) worth.
Let's look at the major claim: that humans will subspeciate. I can't think of anything less likely among a species that has major gene flow between all its populations on a scale of thousands of generations. Species aren't formed by selection for differing adaptive traits within a population, but by the interruption of the gene flow that is caused by migration or invasion…
clock | October 17, 2006Razib and commenters are commenting on this article which appears to be 19th century SF-fantasy repackaged as "serious science" about the future evolution of the human species. Actually, the article is so silly, Razib does not even want to waste time on it and points out only one of the obvious fallacies of the argument, the one about skin color. On the other hand, Lindsay does a thorough and delightful fisking that you may enjoy!
I don't even know in which 'channel' to put this post. I guess it is "biology" but only nominally... as we do not have a "nonsense and having fun with it"…
loom | October 17, 2006As the autumn leaves turn handsomely, I've been wondering, why do trees bother? It's a question scientists have been asking for the past few years, and for the first time, they've carried out an experiment to find out.
The color of an autumn leaf can actually take a lot of work. In the fall, the green chlorophyll in a tree fades away, while the tree actively builds new pigments to turn it red or yellow. It's generally agreed that these colors must serve some function for trees. Otherwise, natural selection would favor drab trees that dropped their leaves without such bother. They could use…
oracknows | October 17, 2006...check out Ed Brayton's masterful fisking of some truly awful anti-evolution "arguments."
Note especially the way that the two bloggers who run the site, when faced with criticisms of their mangling of facts and attributing "holes" in evolutionary theory that really aren't, simply repeat the same fallacious arguments again and again in the comments and keep calling evolution a "conjecture" that is not supported by facts, even though it is arguably the best-supported theory in the history of science.
It's truly depressing to see such astonishing ignorance coupled with such overweening…
jrosenhouse | October 16, 2006We continue now with our discussion of Brian Boyd's article, “Getting it All Wrong,” from the Autumn 2006 issue of The American Scholar. Click here for Part One.
We have already seen Boyd's characterization of modern literary criticism as resting on two pillars: Anti-foundationalism and difference. The former refers to the lack of a secure foundation for knowledge, while the latter refers to the lack of universals in human culture.
In discussing anti-founationalism, Boyd provides the following excellent summary fo the merits of science:
Human minds are as they are because they evolved…
mikethemadbiologist | October 16, 2006I was reading this LA Times story about the quashing of intelligent design creationism in Michigan, and I was stunned by this (italics mine):
Richard Thompson, leader of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, said intelligent design should have a home in science classes. The center describes its mission as defending the religious freedom of Christians.
"It would make students more knowledgeable about science and more interested in science," he said in a phone interview. "Evolution is a theory. It's not a fact."
Evolution is a theory--in the scientific sense of the word. I am certain…
oracknows | October 14, 2006Here we go again.
The "scientists" at the Discovery Institute seldom miss an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot by making specious arguments that anyone with a reasonable understanding of evolution can shoot down. It doesn't take an evolutionary biologist to thoroughly dismantle most of the "scholarship" that flows from the DI (which is indeed fortunate for me, given that I am not an evolutionary biologist). Leave it to the North Koreans, with their recent apparently successful test of a nuclear explosive device, to give the intrepid Don Quixotes over in Seattle the excuse to tilt at…
evolvingthoughts | October 13, 2006Ars Technica has an interesting post on how scientists themselves view the tentative nature of science. In ordinary language, a tentative conclusion is not to be preferred (the old "evolution is just a theory" canard), but in science it is in fact a virtue. Science's conclusions are meant to be tentative, but a paradox is that as its conclusions are used and extended, that tentative nature tends to evaporate over time.
John Timmer asked a number of scientists how they viewed their data, their models and the broad theoretical frameworks. He got differing answers from different fields.…