evolution
loom | September 18, 2006Over the weekend I wrote about the natural history of the Escherichia coli strain that has contaminated spinach. According to reports today, 109 people have been identified as sickened with Escherichia coli O157:H7, and one has died. In the comment thread of my post, the subject of antibiotics came up. It turns out that antibiotics are the last thing you want to take if you get sick with Escherichia coli O157:H7. It may turn a nasty--but temporary--case of bloody diarrhea into fatal organ failure.
More below the fold...
Like other microbes, Escherichia coli O157:H7 carries a number genes…
loom | September 17, 2006I'm gearing up for some autumn talks. First up: Notre Dame University University of Notre Dame. The title of the talk is, "The Darwin Beat: Reporting on Evolution in a Controversial Age."
When: Thursday, September 21, 4 pm.
Where: Jordan Hall Auditorium, Rm. 101
More information here.
I'll let you know about some more talks as they approach.
evolvingthoughts | September 17, 2006
The more I hear of the international and national response about Steve Irwin, the more my flabber is gasted. I mean, I came to a grudging respect for the guy when I went to Australia Zoo with my kids about three years ago, and saw the show and the zoo, and it not only didn't suck but was in fact well done, both as a zoo and as a tourist attraction. But why the emotion?
On Friday last I dragged myself from my death bed (hey, I'm male, I have a cold, so pity me!) to take two visiting Canadians, Don and Claudette, to the Zoo. Upon arriving (about an hour after the last of the tickets to Irwin…
evolvingthoughts | September 16, 2006Some of you may know I am a contributor to the Talkorigins.org Archive (hey, it's written down the page, to the left, OK? No it's not. It's written on my homepage. Oops). My contributions have been done over the better part of a decade, and obviously as I learn more, I have to revise them. I have just finished, with the assistance of Mike Hopkins who did the actual work of making my words safe for the Internet, a major revision of the Macroevolution FAQ.
I originally did this because people were saying that "macroevolution" and "microevolution" were terms invented by creationists. This might…
evolvingthoughts | September 15, 2006
I'm reading Robert Carneiro's Evolution in Cultural Anthropology (Westview Press, 2003) right now, and it's a good introduction to the debate over cultural evolution in the social sciences from Spencer to the present day. But I have some criticisms.
Carneiro's view of cultural evolution is basically Spencer's - evolution means unilinear progress. He got this via his mentors Leslie White, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service. He criticises Boyd, Richerson and Rindos for being too "neo-Darwinian":
Rindos states that as raw material to work on, "Darwinian selectionism requires undirected,…
loom | September 15, 2006Don't eat your spinach.
That's the word coming today from the FDA: they want everyone to avoid bagged spinach until they can get to the bottom of a nasty outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7, a virulent strain that infects an estimated 70,000 people in the United States and kills about 60. A number of people have gotten sick in the new outbreak, apparently from eating contaminated spinach, and there's been a report of one death in Wisconsin.
There's a fascinating--albeit gruesome--backstory to this outbreak, which I've been researching for my next book, a portrait of Escherichia coli.…
loom | September 15, 2006Welcome to the club, Chris Mooney...
Chris Mooney is the author of the excellent book, The Republican War on Science. He examines big hot-button scientific issues of the day such as global warming, stem cell research, and, of course, evolution. It's a polemic, to be sure, but a well-researched one. Over the past couple weeks I've been meaning to write a post here to let readers know that it has just come out in paperback, with some great updates since the hardback. But it's been hard enough for me to find time to blog, period, and it seemed like Mooney was enjoying a good reception without…
razib | September 15, 2006A new find pushes the date for the last Neandertals in southern Iberia to 28 K B.P., but John Hawks advises some skepticism. I'd listen to Hawks, he's a pro, but, I would also assume it is important to remember that normally the first and last appearance of a species in the fossil record often does not capture the full time span of its existence. If you read my posts about introgression you will likely intuit that I still find the new work interesting because of the possibility of long term spatial mosaicism between Neandertals and H. sapiens sapiens. Interestingly, Erik Trinkaus has come…
cmooney | September 15, 2006Okay, the "rebuttal" (PDF) of my work from the Discovery Institute went online early today. So I have at least gotten to peruse it briefly. I can't allege that I was "surprised" by it, though the timing of its release remains curious.
Anyway, you can peruse the document yourself, here, and compare it with my chapter on ID. I've done so, and, well...I'll tell you my opinion later. This is the time for your own reactions.
P.S.: Casey Luskin came to my talk last night. I appreciate his openness to hearing the other point of view, and he seems like a perfectly nice guy. However I gave him a…
cmooney | September 14, 2006The Discovery Institute is apparently going to come out with a report tomorrow outlining 14 "false facts" in my book. I hope that the first I hear about the contents of this report is not on the air with Michael Medved. We'll see.
Still, we can start with Discovery's press release announcing the so-far-unpublished report, and see what kinds of critiques they're promising. Let's take the first:
Mooney writes: "Wherever uncertainty remains in the current evolutionary account--and as we have seen, uncertainty can never be fully dispelled in science--ID theorists swoop in and claim, "God must…
razib | September 14, 2006PLOS has an interesting article which reports on the differentiation of European populations into northern and southern clusters, along with separability between various nationalities. Since until recently mate selection has been a function of distance and topography, and national borders also tended to be bounded by physical features (e.g., the Alps or the Pyrenees), it is no surprise that, on average, the French tend to cluster with other French. But, I do think quantification such as this is useful:
...most individual participants with southern European ancestry (Italian, Spanish,…
cmooney | September 14, 2006Man, I just arrived in Seattle and had scarcely gotten a nap in when I woke up to find this:
SEATTLE -- In his book The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney declares war on intelligent design, calling it a "reactionary crusade" promoted by "[s]cience abusers." Discovery Institute now responds to Mooney's war on intelligent design (ID) by publishing a detailed report, "Whose War Is It, Anyway? Exposing Chris Mooney's Attack on Intelligent Design," documenting 14 major errors Mooney makes when writing about ID in his book. The report will be available online on Friday, Sept. 15.
"Why do so…
pharyngula | September 14, 2006
We are all familiar with the idea that there are strikingly different kinds of eyes in animals: insects have compound eyes with multiple facets, while we vertebrates have simple lens eyes. It seems like a simple evolutionary distinction, with arthropods exhibiting one pattern and vertebrates another, but the story isn't as clean and simple as all that. Protostomes exhibit a variety of different kinds of eyes, leading to the suggestion that eyes have evolved independently many times; in addition, eyes differ in more than just their apparent organization, and there are some significant…
cmooney | September 13, 2006Okay, I'm readying myself for the criticisms and hate mail....I have agreed to debate Jonathan Wells again, this time for an hour. And it's going to be on a conservative show: The Michael Medved Show out of Seattle. We're doing it in studio, from 1 to 2 pm PT, on Friday.
Okay, now's your chance to fire away with all the reasons why I shouldn't be doing this. Or, if you're in the mood, feel free to post any constructive comments concerning my last performance against Wells; or, thoughts on what I might do differently this time; or, vivid descriptions of just how badly I'm going to get my butt…
hrynyshyn | September 13, 2006At long last: scientific proof for intelligent design. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, the banana!
As far as I can tell, this guy is serious. He's the Rev. Ray Comfort. Gotta love him. Thanks to Jody Wheeler for bringing it to my attention
clock | September 13, 2006One of the coolest parasites ever (from February 04, 2006):
I am quite surprised that Carl Zimmer, in research for his book Parasite Rex, did not encounter the fascinating case of the Ampulex compressa (Emerald Cockroach Wasp) and its prey/host the American Cockroach (Periplaneta americana, see also comments on Aetiology and Ocellated).
In 1999, I went to Oxford, UK, to the inaugural Gordon Conference in Neuroethology and one of the many exciting speakers I was looking forward to seeing was Fred Libersat. The talk was half-hot half-cold. To be precise, the first half was hot and the second…
evolgen | September 13, 2006Doc Myers has another evo-devo post up; this one is on conserved dorsal-ventral patterning in the vertebrate and arthropod nervous systems. This stuff is fascinating, and Myers does a great job of explaining the research for a general audience. I'd imagine he's an amazing teacher, as well. The entire field of evo-devo is really increasing our understanding of the evolution of animal body plans, with many more interesting discoveries on the horizon.
But it doesn't really do much to explain evolution on a broader scale. Work in the field of evo-devo is mostly limited to animals, with some stuff…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2006
Previous posts in this thread: 1, 2, and 3
With this model of the bounded rationality of anti-science in mind, what lessons can we draw from it for public policy and education?
Assuming that the model is a good first approximation of why people choose to believe creationist and other anti-science belief sets, several implications might affect our mode of public education and discourse.
The first is that it is highly unlikely that we can argue creationists et al. out of their belief sets by merely presenting better information about science. Since they lack the epistemic values that…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006LifeSite has this: Pope Preaches Against Chance Evolution: "Man is Not the Chance Result of Evolution".
Yep, it's the old "evolution implies chance and a lack of meaning" trick. Second time we've fallen for that this week. Would you believe...?
For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, this seems very Controlish. The pope is worried about KAOS. They had a Cone of Silence conversation, which pretty well everyone in the world overheard, and while I'm very pleased that the Catholic Church isn't about to go ID on our asses, we might perhaps think a little bit about this.
In a homily in…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006
From the old blog: Tom Wolfe, whose works often show a considerable pretentiousness in my opinion, has a piece in the New York Sun entitled "Darwin meets his match" [old link dead, so this will have to do]. In this he adduces Zola and Weber, and most of all the 1950s American sociologists whose works stressed status seeking and display, to show that there is something missing from Darwinian theory.
Like social dominance ethology and psychology never happened, right? Darwin talked about social dominance and submission several times, and much of Weber's dialectic comes from the tradition of…