evolution
stcynic | August 28, 2006Well I watched about half of the abominable D. James Kennedy special about Darwin and Hitler last night, about as much as I could stomach. It was every bit as bad as I imagined, perhaps even worse. The dishonesty absolutely leapt off the screen. At one point they present noted paleontological scholar Ann Coulter claiming that "all animal phyla" appeared in the Cambrian "in the blink of an eye" - yes, she actually said that. Apparently in Coulter's world, 70 or 80 million years is "the blink of an eye".
Most galling, I thought, was that they invoked Hitler's book Mein Kampf as being laced with…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2006I won't comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren't worth the effort. But those whose minds aren't made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some part of the Holocaust. After all, that sneaking suspicion is what the unDiscovery Institute wants to implant.
So, what's the real story?
There are several ways in which evolution might have made it possible for the sort of racial eugenics that rationalised (not motivated - the German tradition of anti-Semitism goes back as far as Luther, and to the middle…
oracknows | August 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 26, 2006The other day, in the wake of D. James Kennedy's dishonest documentary Darwin's Deadly Legacy, which blatantly tried to blame the Holocaust and Nazi racial hygiene policies to Darwin's theory of evolution in a totally dishonest way. Particularly ridiculous was Richard Weikart's emphasison the observation that the Nazis used the term "selection" when doctors met each new train transport of Jews at the entrances to the camps to choose who would go straight to the gas chambers and who would survive a while to work, most likely to die in a matter of weeks or months of a combination of starvation…
clock | August 26, 2006As we age, our sleep gets less well consolidated: we take more naps during the day and wake up more oftenduring the night. This happens to other mammals as their age. Now we know that it also happens in Drosophila:
"As humans age, so I'm told, they tend not to sleep as well. There are all sorts of reasons -- aches and pains, worries about work and lifelong accumulations of sins that pretty much rule out the sweet sleep of innocence.
But what about fruit flies? Not as a cause of insomnia. What about the problems fruit flies have sleeping?
Yes, Drosophila melanogaster also suffer sleep…
cmooney | August 26, 2006You folks may have found it already, but Panda's Thumb is in the midst of posting a series of takedowns of Jonathan Wells' new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Having read the book myself, I was very, very unimpressed by the attack on evolution that Wells offered. But not being an expert on embryology or other biological subfields, I wasn't completely aware of just how weak Wells' arguments actually were in some cases. So check out Panda's Thumb for all the details.
neurotopia | August 26, 2006The takedown intro has been posted at The Panda's Thumb. If the server's down, keep checking in. Over the next week or two, various bloggers will pick apart the different chapters and expose this trash for what it is; a coffee table book for the sycophantic zombies among us. While I predict it will have a very limited audience, that audience consists primarily of so-called "family values" politicians who will buy into this vapid PR campaign.
Yours truly will pick a Chapter apart midway through next week, so check back here around Wednesday. In the meantime, Tara has already trashed one…
loom | August 25, 2006The language of DNA is written in a four-letter alphabet. The four different chemical units of DNA (called nucleotides) create an incomprehenisbly vast range of possibility codes. Consider a short sequence of 41 nucleotides. There are over 4.8 trillion trillion possible sequences it could take. In this vast universe of possibilities, how can natural selection hit on new DNA sequences that help life survive?
All living things have genes. Enzymes read those genes and produce a copy of their code, which a cell can then use to build a protein. But in order to read a gene, the enzymes must first…
sporte | August 25, 2006Like biology, all bioinformatics is based on the idea that living things shared a common ancestor. I have posted, and will post other articles that test that notion, but for the moment, we're going to use that idea as a starting point in today's quest.
If we agree that we have a common ancestor, then we can use that idea as a basis to ask some interesting questions about our genomes. For, example, we know that genomes change over time - we've looked at single nucleotide changes here and here, and we've seen that large chunks of DNA can move around here.
So, it's interesting to consider…
scientificactivist | August 25, 2006...Or at least that's the impression that college freshmen with US Department of Education Smart Grants are getting, the The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Tuesday:
Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages....
The awards in question -- known as Smart Grants, for the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent program -- were created by…
evolvingthoughts | August 24, 2006evolgen reports on debates in Nature about whether the term "prokaryote" is meaningful. Norman Pace argued that the term is a negative one ("privative" in Aristotle's sense), defined by what they do not have (which is to say, a nuclear membrane surrounding the genetic material). Now Bill Martin and Eugene Koonin have weighed in with a letter in which they say
Prokaryotes are cells with co-transcriptional translation on their main chromosomes; they translate nascent messenger RNAs into protein. The presence of this character distinguishes them from cells that possess a nucleus and do not…
pharyngula | August 24, 2006
This article is part of a series of critiques of Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design that will be appearing at the Panda's Thumb over the course of the next week or so. Previously, I'd dissected the summary of chapter 3. This is a longer criticism of the whole of the chapter, which is purportedly a critique of evo-devo.
Jonathan Wells is a titular developmental biologist, so you'd expect he'd at least get something right in his chapter on development and evolution in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, but no:…
loom | August 24, 2006Cut-and-paste creationism?
Yesterday I pointed readers to a column attacking evolution by Jack Kemp on the web site Town Hall. Today a sharp-eyed commenter pointed out that it is almost entirely identical to a column from Phyllis Schlafly from August 16 on the Eagle Forum. I don't know if these pages are going to be pulled down or otherwise altered if word gets out, so here's a screengrab of Kemp and of Schlafly. It looks pretty much word for word identical to me. You be the judge...
Update 2:50 pm: I wonder if Town Hall got its columnists jumbled. This page lists Kemp's column and a piece by…
evolgen | August 24, 2006In last week's edition of Phylogeny Fridays, I mentioned an essay that argued that biologists should refrain from using the term "prokaryote" because its definition is entirely negative. The author, Norman Pace, writes, "no one can define what is a prokaryote, only what it is not." Furthermore, I pointed out that prokaryotes are a paraphyletic taxon (a statement that drew some criticism in the comments), and that alone should lead to the disuse of the term.
In a letter to Nature, Bill Martin and Eugene Koonin point out that there is a positive definition of prokaryotes:
Prokaryotes are cells…
pharyngula | August 24, 2006The Friends of Charles Darwin website update I mentioned yesterday is complete (I toasted it with a latte instead of a whiskey, I'm afraid). You do know that if you join, you are then entitled to put an official "FCD" after your name, which looks very distinguished and high-falutin' (I just refrain because I'm shy about bragging about my honors.) The FCD requires just about as much work and more intelligence than the Ph.D. that Kent Hovind has after his name, so it's worth going for.
loom | August 23, 2006Scoop up some dirt, and you'll probably wind up with some slime mold. Many species go by the common name of slime mold, but the ones scientists know best belong to the genus Dictyostelium. They are amoebae, and for the most part they live the life of a rugged individualist. Each slime mold prowls through the soil, searching for bacteria which it engulfs and digests. After gorging itself sufficiently, it divides in two, and the new pair go their separate, bacteria-devouring ways. But if the Dictyostelium in a stamp-size plot of soil should eat their surroundings clean, they send each other…
clock | August 23, 2006Not really a review of Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children" but musing (practically SF itself) on the topic of these books (from April 20, 2005):
Did A Virus Make You Smart?
I've been reading science-fiction pretty much all my life. I usually go through "phases" when I hit on a particular author and read several books by the same person. Last year I was in my Greg Bear phase and I have read eight of his books. He is one of those writers who gets better with age: more recent his book, more I liked it.
His is also some of the hardest of hard sci-fi around. He must be a…
sporte | August 23, 2006Did HIV become resistant to Atazanavir because of a genetic change?
Was that genetic change inherited?
Did HIV evolve?
Can we explain why genetic changes at specific sites might help HIV escape the effects of the drug?
Let's find out.
All of the sequences in the image below (except for the first) come from HIV strains that were isolated from patients who took Atazanavir and no other protease inhibitors. All of the strains of HIV from patients were resistant to the drug.
If an amino acid is different from other strains, the color at that position is changed. Since we see different…
scientificactivist | August 22, 2006If you love science and don't know how to show it, there are a few sites out there that'll be more than willing to help you out. Here are a couple of examples:
At Support Our Scientists, you can buy a magnetic ribbon to show your support wherever you drive. It looks a bit like one of those "Support Our Troops" magnetic ribbons, but it's a little more attractive--sporting the shape of a DNA double helix--and a lot less Orwellian. Hey, if I were back in car-happy America, I'd probably rock one of those.
On the other hand, if you're looking for something to decorate yourself with, I Believe…
cmooney | August 22, 2006Here is how Wells ends his book:
So a growing number of bright young men and women have the courage to question Darwinism, study intelligent design, and follow the evidence where it leads. They know they are in the middle of a major scientific revolution. And the future belongs to them. (p. 207)
This is wildly overstated. There is no paradigm shift going on. This isn't plate-tectonics. Kuhn doesn't apply.
Nevertheless, I actually agree with something that Wells says in his last chapter as he builds up to this, namely the following: "Anyone who studies American history knows that telling…