evolution
gregladen | April 2, 2011Most evolutionary biologist have fully rejected the "hopeful monster theory" but it turns out they were wrong to do so.
Most mutations are deleterious, and are quickly weeded out of a population but in some cases not before they briefly cause hideous results that make everyone turn away in horror and disgust. But sometimes a hideous mutation can produce something new and amazing, something novel and wonderful, something never before seen and but which we could never imagine the world doing without. Here is an example:
Original Mutation:
F1 Generation:
F2 Generation:
Case closed.
jrosenhouse | March 29, 2011Having communicated for so long by blog and e-mail, it was a pleasure to finally meet Jerry Coyne in person last night. He was speaking at the University of Maryland. It was not the easiest trip in the world. Driving was out of the question since it would have involved braving the Beltway near rush hour. With all due respect to Jerry, there ain't no one worth that kind of trouble. But UM has its own Metro stop. So I drove to the Vienna station, took a long train ride that involved three of DC's five Metro lines, then a bus over to the campus, and then the following conversation:
ME (to…
tfk | March 28, 2011The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Jonathan Swift, "On Poetry: A Rhapsody"
There's so much to love about this story from Nature News. While surveying genetic snippets from a hypersaline lake in Antarctica, an Australian research team found a virus that preys on other viruses. And they sorted out the ecology of the lake well enough to figure out that the virus infected by the virus-infecting virus is a major predator on the…
oracknows | March 27, 2011Grant time again! Since today--yes, today!--is the deadline for a rather big grant I'm writing (not quite R01 level, but a respectable three year project if I can get it), I was up until the wee hours of the morning trying to put this sucker to bed. Being the ever-benevolent blogger, though, far be it from me to deny you some Insolence. It's just recycled Insolence. Of course, given that this is nearly four years old, if you've been reading less than four years, it's new to you! I'll be back tomorrow; that is, assuming I've recovered. As I look at this post, it occurs to me that I haven't…
mikethemadbiologist | March 24, 2011Because we are human after all. Jason Collins at Evolving Economics, in response to my post about one economist's misunderstanding of biology, asks a very good question:
On the flip side, did Dawkins or Gould (or their respective supporters) ever concede to the other side that they were wrong and substantially change their world view?
I agree with Razib about what happened:
My own attitude is that both Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould retreated from maximalist positions when it came to the gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium arguments of the 1970s substantively. But rhetorically they…
pharyngula | March 23, 2011I was not kind in my assessment of Jesse Bering's story about the evolutionary psychology of homophobia. He was quite irate with me and several other people who pointed out the tattered fabric of his evidence. Now he has gone scurrying back to the author of the study he described, Gordon Gallup, and gotten his take in a rather tendentious interview. Between the two of them, unfortunately, they still can't manage to address anyou of our criticisms. It's a very weird conversation: here's how he handles me.
One common complaint lodged against evolutionary psychology is that its methods, which…
tfk | March 21, 2011Mike the Mad Biologist weighs in on a debate Brad Delong has been curating, about the status of economics as a science. Noting that examples from biology are being introduced as comparisons for economics, Mike writes:
It really does matter: if economists are going to use biology as a model for their discipline, we need them to understand ours, to help improve theirs. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Upon which, he administers a firm but gentle smackdown to Russ Roberts. Read it, enjoy it.
mikethemadbiologist | March 21, 2011It really does matter: if economists are going to use biology as a model for their discipline, we need them to understand ours, to help improve theirs. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
By way of Brad DeLong, we stumble across this Russ Roberts piece discussing the question of what kind of science (if any) is economics. What bothered me in reading the original piece was how badly the biology was mangled (which doesn't give me much hope for economics). Let's go to Roberts (italics mine):
I have often said that economics, to the extent it is a science, is like biology rather than physics.…
mikethemadbiologist | March 18, 2011Jeremy Yoder has a good takedown of another article by Jesse Bering. This time, Bering argues that homophobia is adaptive. This is the key point:
Bering's post focuses on a series of studies by the evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup. Gallup was interested in the question of whether there might be an adaptive explanation for homophobia--which, given the fact that many (although far from all) human cultures treat homosexuality as a taboo--is a fair question for research. He hypothesized that treating homosexuality as taboo helped to prevent homosexual adults from contacting a homophobic…
tfk | March 18, 2011Via Southern Fried Scientist, the Galapagos-based Charles Darwin Foundation reports:
In the aftermath of the tidal surges induced by the March 11th Japan earthquake and tsunami, a team of more than 20 staff and volunteers worked shoulder to shoulder to clear debris, retrieve equipment and clean laboratories, offices and storage buildings at the Marine Sciences complex of the Galapagos-based Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) and Research Station on Santa Cruz Island.
The powerful surf hit Santa Cruz with waves up to 1.77m /5.8 feet above normalâ¦. The waves also coincided with the local high…
pharyngula | March 16, 2011Jesse Bering disappointed me recently. He started off another evolutionary psychology story with this warning.
Consider this a warning: the theory I'm about to describe is likely to boil untold liters of blood and prompt mountains of angry fists to clench in revolt. It's the best--the kindest--of you out there likely to get the most upset, too. I'd like to think of myself as being in that category, at least, and these are the types of visceral, illogical reactions I admittedly experienced in my initial reading of this theory. But that's just the non-scientist in me flaring up, which, on…
pharyngula | March 15, 2011
About 600 million years ago, or a little more, there was a population of small wormlike creatures that were the forebears of all modern bilaterian animals. They were small, soft-bodied, and simple, not much more than a jellyfish in structure, and they lived by crawling sluglike over the soft muck of the sea bottom. We have no fossils of them, and no direct picture of their form, but we know a surprising amount about them because we can infer the nature of their genes.
These animals would have been the predecessors of flies and squid, cats and starfish, and what we can do is look at the genes…
jrosenhouse | March 10, 2011Francis Collins and Karl Giberson have a new book out called The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions, published by InterVarsity Press. It is yet another defense of theistic evolution.
I'm always a bit conflicted when I write about this topic. On the one hand I do not think theistic evolution is a reasonable view, and I think the arguments made on its behalf are very weak. On the other hand, if I am stuck with religious faith being a major force in society then far better that it be the faith of theistic evolutionists than that of young-Earth creationists.…
oracknows | March 2, 2011The other day, I wrote to express my disappointment with Dr. Kevin Pho, of KevinMD, for posting credulous crap about alternative medicine. I noted in an addendum that he responded with a comment that in essence said that he posts things he "doesn't necessarily agree with myself to promote discussion and debate":
Orac,
I appreciate the critique. As readers of this blog know, I often post pieces here I don't necessarily agree with myself to promote discussion and debate. Your concerns are certainly valid, and will be taken into consideration as I choose future pieces.
Best,
Kevin
My initial…
pharyngula | March 2, 2011xkcd digs into cladistics.
Unfortunately, his cladogram is wrong. Mammals should also be a subset of the reptiles, so the herpetologists should be demanding that all other amniotes be absorbed into their more inclusive field of tetrapod biology.
At least, until the ichthyologists show up and point out that we're all just weird dry land-walking fish.
Just to clear this up, I hope, here's a modified version of a cladistic diagram to show what herps are:
So if you want to avoid the sins of polyphyly or paraphyly, you must include birds and mammals in the herps. Of course, the alternative is…
gregladen | February 26, 2011How old is the earth?
Short answer: 4,540,000,00/H30 Earth-years, plus or minus 1%.
Long answer: We don't know exactly because direct dating of the earliest material on the surface of the Earth will only tell use a minimum age; Prior to that, the Earth's surface was probably molten, and even after that, it may be that the earliest non-molten material has been recycled into the planet's interior by tectonic processes. Also, the earth is a big round ball of stuff that condensed into this shape from part of a large disk-shaped blob of stuff known as the Solar Nebula. When exactly, given this,…
pharyngula | February 26, 2011There are some useful tells. My favorite has the been the classic quotemine, where creationists quote one sentence of Darwin's — "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree" — to claim that Darwin was stumped by the evolution of the eye. As everyone who has read the Origin knows, what he was doing there was setting up…
jdupuis | February 21, 2011While I don't have a huge amount of experience reading science-themed graphic novels, I do sort of have a sense that they come in two different broad categories.
The first is basically transforming a boring, stilted, text-heavy textbook into a boring, stilted, illustration- and text-heavy graphic novel. In other words, the producers think that anything in graphic novel format will by definition be more interesting and engaging than something that's purely text-based.
The second involves taking advantage of the strengths of the graphic novel format to re-imagine how scientific knowledge can…
tfk | February 16, 2011
Last Sunday, I talked at Kol Hadash, a secular Jewish community, about NCSE's recent work in the creation/evolution trenches. Our intrepid communications director Robert Luhn was there to film it, and has posted video of the talk to our Youtube channel. The Q&A will follow.
A big shout out to a South Dakota student who comments:
Wow. I live in South Dakota. We just learned about global warming. We were taught it was fact. I'm sure in a lot of the small towns the kids are being taught that global warming is only a theory. I hate that this is an actual resolution. I wouldn't vote for…
cagapakis | February 15, 2011One organism's trash is another organism's treasure. Our cellular wastes, carbon dioxide and water, nourish plants, which with added energy from sunlight produce the oxygen and sugars that we need to survive. At microscopic scales, these cycles of waste and food can get much more complicated, with many species of microbes working together to survive in harsh environments with limited nutrients.
When organisms (like us) digest sugars made of carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O), they split them up into carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrogen ions (H+) and high-energy electrons (e-) that were…