evolution
evolvingthoughts | July 26, 2006
In which our hero discovers the joys of walking...
Next on my trip, I visited David Williams, a paleobiologist at the Museum of Natural History in London. We talked at length about the nature of systematics (which is something I am increasingly less certain about) and of the history of species concepts. Then he showed me some of the marvellous architecture that Richard Owen commissioned when he built the place. It really is made to look like a Cathedral of Science, with mock Gothic architecture and vaulting ceilings, all decorated with biological themes, I am pleased to say. Despite his…
pharyngula | July 26, 2006Yunnanozoans and Xidazoon…there are some very pretty early Cambrian critters on display at Sinanthropus.
oracknows | July 25, 2006Alright, now they've gone too far.
I thought I'd seen every specious and fallacious argument and example that creationists could throw out there to annoy scientists and be gobbled up by the credulous, but I was wrong. They're muscling in on my turf now! No, they're not making fallacious arguments about how chemotherapy resistance says nothing about evolution. Been there, done that, and I doubt I'd bother if I were to see yet another such post. No, they're not twist the fact that cancer is often due to mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressors regulating cell growth and differentiation as "…
grrlscientist | July 24, 2006Okay, I have one comment about this streaming video, but I will resist the urge to say anything until after you've watched it first (below the fold).
Oh yeah? Well, using that same er, "logic", gawd invented liquor because he wants us all to be raging alcoholics.
.
tags: banana, atheism, godlessness, IDiots, religious fanatics, wingnuts
pharyngula | July 24, 2006
Mark Chu-Carroll has a post up that does two admirable things: it deflates yet another creationist and his grandly fallacious claims, and it gives me a new toy to play with.
The first part is a debunking of Granville Sewell, a mathematician and darling of the Intelligent Design creationists. Sewell actually is a professor of mathematics, so it's somewhat embarrassing to see a fellow professional humiliate himself with such ancient, bogus creationist complaints, such as that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics, or that stepwise change can't occur. I'll also recommend…
loom | July 24, 2006The Washington Post has an article today called And the Evolutionary Beat Goes On . . .. It is based on some interviews with scientists who are documenting evidence of natural selection in humans. I won't be surprised if it gets emailed hither and yon, but not for the text, which is based on stuff that's been out for some months now. No, it's got a slick animation with the following caption: "A morphing demonstration of human evolution shows the transformation from a small lemur, up the evolutionary ladder into a human: seen here as legendary evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould."
The…
purepedantry | July 24, 2006The Economist has an article about an economist using evolutionary ideas. To wit:
...Eric Beinhocker, of the McKinsey Global Institute, has undertaken his own 500-page haj, entitled "The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics". In places (such as its headline call for a "paradigm shift" in economics) the book may irk Mr Krugman and other gatekeepers of the profession. But it is good enough, and scholarly enough, to warrant their attention rather than their scorn.
Indeed, Mr Beinhocker is himself critical of "loose analogising" between biology and…
purepedantry | July 23, 2006Fanged killer kangaroo fossils discovered:
Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom".
A University of New South Wales team said the fearsome fossils were among 20 previously unknown species uncovered at a site in northwest Queensland state.
Professor Michael Archer said on Wednesday the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolf-like fangs were found as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo.
"…
oracknows | July 23, 2006Eh Nonymous has posted a first hand account of a speech by Judge John E. Jones III, who decided the Kitzmiller v. Dover case on "intelligent design" creationism in Dover. We need more judges like him. My only thought is: How on earth did this guy get appointed to the federal bench by the Bush Administration? He's way too reasonable and unwilling to let religion influence his decision-making process.
I'm sure it's a mistake the Bush Administration won't make again.
neurotopia | July 22, 2006I just don't get it. On one hand, Francis Collins is clearly a bright guy and an established researcher. He headed the Human Genome Project, for cryin' out loud. He's an evangelical Christian, which I personally don't care about one way or the other, as long as his beliefs remain his personal beliefs. An article in the Washington Post, however, has me wondering what he's thinking.
Certainly Dr. Collins is one of the more prominent advocates for the compatibility of science and religion. On one hand I admire that. Many of the extreme religious conservative persuasion have set up a…
razib | July 21, 2006Update: Update at the bottom....
In reference to the sequencing of the Neandertal genome, Kambiz at Anthropology.net states:
I have one little gripe with the New York Times article. Wade quotes a geneticist, Dr. Bruce Lahn saying there is, "evidence from the human genome suggests some interbreeding with an archaic species." Has he not read Paabo's paper 2004 PLoS paper, "No Evidence of Neandertal mtDNA Contribution to Early Modern Humans?" There is significant mtDNA evidence to stongly conclude that humans and Neandertals did not interbread directly.
I left a comment on that website, but I…
clock | July 21, 2006
Some plants do not want to get eaten. They may grow in places difficult to approach, they may look unappetizing, or they may evolve vile smells. Some have a fuzzy, hairy or sticky surface, others evolve thorns. Animals need to eat those plants to survive and plants need not be eaten by animals to survive, so a co-evolutionary arms-race leads to ever more bizzare adaptations by plants to deter the animals and ever more ingenious adaptations by animals to get around the deterrents.
One of the most efficient ways for a plant to deter a herbivore is to divert one of its existing biochemical…
loom | July 20, 2006As I wrote in May, there have been some signs that scientists were gearing up to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. Now it's official, as Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times. [link fixed] I'm particularly intrigued that the paleoanthropologists doing this work are teaming up with a hot little biotech company down the road from me in Branford, Connecticut called 454. They had a paper out recently showing how they can sequence DNA much faster than by conventional methods. Combine classic fossil work with the latest in genome sequencing, and voila...
Update, seconds later: Whoops, forgot to…
pharyngula | July 20, 2006Books from Nobel laureates in molecular biology have a tradition of being surprising. James Watson(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was catty, gossipy, and amusingly egotistical; Francis Crick(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) went haring off in all kinds of interesting directions, like a true polymath; and Kary Mullis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was just plain nuts. When I heard that Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was coming out with a book, my interest and curiousity were definitely piqued. The work by Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus has shaped my entire discipline, so I was eagerly anticipating what her new book,…
pharyngula | July 19, 2006How do you make a limb? Vertebrate limbs are classic models in organogenesis, and we know a fair bit about the molecular events involved. Limbs are induced at particular boundaries of axial Hox gene expression, and the first recognizable sign of their formation is the appearance of a thickened epithelial bump, the apical ectodermal ridge (AER). The AER is a signaling center that produces, in particular, a set of growth factors such as Fgf4 and Fgf8 that trigger the growth of the underlying tissue, causing the growing limb to protrude. In addition, there's another signaling center that forms…
loom | July 19, 2006
As I browsed the new papers published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, I was brought up short by this frolicsome picture. It's a nice example of the visual display of information done right. It shows the spread of primates 55 million years ago across the Northern Hemisphere. I'm always game to learn about what primates were up to in Wyoming and Greenland. But this picture--and the paper that goes with it--have an extra value. They offer some clues to what sort of world we may be creating by pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.…
clock | July 19, 2006Evolution of Female Orgasm is one of the ever-recurring themes on blogs. This post was first written on June 13, 2005. There were several follow-ups as well, e.g.,
here, here and here. Under the fold.
The discussion about the recent studies on female orgasm, first about its adaptive function and later about its genetic component, has been raging around the blogosphere for a while now. It was spawned by the publication of Elizabeth Lloyd's book on the topic (it is on my wish-list), and by a paper in Biology Letters about the genetics of female orgasm based on a survey of twins. For…
mikethemadbiologist | July 19, 2006
(via Shakespeare's Sister)
I've always found it odd that Christian conservatives constantly claim victim status, particularly when so many of them, when it comes to foreign policy are so convinced that will can overcome anything. It's sort of like Norman Vincent Pearle but with fighter bombers. Then again, logical consistency isn't exactly the Christian conservatives' strong suit.
The latest hue and cry of discrimination revolves around pharmacists and other healthcare workers who refuse to provide legal procedures and medications such as contraception and birth control. Shakespeare's…
jrosenhouse | July 18, 2006One of the more annoying fictions promoted by the media is the one about John McCain being a moderate. A plain-speaking independent who states it plain and calls it the way he sees it. Of course, it's long been obvious to anyone who's been paying attention that he's a staunch right-winger, but don't tell that to any of the drooling sycophants who host cable news chat shows. The idea that McCain was some sort free-spirit should have been allayed by the sickening spectacle of his embrace of the President in the 2004 campaign. This is the same President who won the 2000 South Carolina…