evolution
oracknows | July 6, 2006It's that time again, time for the 38th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle.
Thirsty?
Well, LBBP over at Skeptic Rant offers parched skeptics a fine assortment of beverages including Satire Cider, Quack Quencher, Woo Brew, and Creationist Tonic, among others. It's just the cool, refreshing dose of critical thinking to quench that skeptical thirst that's been intensified by the rampant credulity of society in general and the blogosphere in particular.
Drink deep!
And come on back for the 39th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which will be hosted by Mike over at (appropriately enough) Mike's Weekly…
pharyngula | July 5, 2006
Last week, I received some delusional e-mail from Phil Skell, who claims that modern biology has no use for evolutionary theory.
This will raise hysterical screeches from its true-believers. But, instead they should take a deep breath and tell us how the theory is relevant to the modern biology. For examples let them tell the relevance of the theory to learning…the discovery and function of hormones…[long list of scientific disciplines truncated]
Dr Skell is a sad case. He apparently repeats his mantra that biology has no need of evolution everywhere he goes, and has never bothered to…
jlynch | July 5, 2006Over at the Panda's Thumb, Dave Thomas has an enlightening piece on his experiments with genetic algorithms in which he takes on claims by Dembski, John Bracht and others. Thomas shows (contra claims by ID supporters) that GAs can successfully evolve solutions using random mutation and selection without specifiying a target, just like in biological evolution. I predict much smoke and mirrors by Dembski and friends.
[tags: intelligent design | anti-evolution | genetic algorithms ]
mikethemadbiologist | July 5, 2006
I might have more to say about the Delaware mini-pogrom later, but by way of Bartholomew's Notes on Religion, I found this bit of abject idiocy:
Just two hours prior, while executive session was held, Bennett led nearly 100 spectators in song as they waited patiently for the news.
..."If these kids are taught evolution -- that they came from apes -- and they're not given the basis of faith, what's to stop them from acting like animals?" he said.
"What's to stop them from acting like animals?" I dunno. How about doing your fucking job as a parent, and setting a good example? Not running…
clock | July 5, 2006I wrote this book review back on February 18, 2006. Under the fold...
I see that Joan Roughgarden has a new paper in Science this week: Reproductive Social Behavior: Cooperative Games to Replace Sexual Selection
Theories about sexual selection can be traced back to Darwin in 1871. He proposed that males fertilize as many females as possible with inexpensive sperm, whereas females, with a limited supply of large eggs, select the genetically highest quality males to endow their offspring with superior capabilities. Since its proposal, problems with this narrative have continued to accumulate,…
mikethemadbiologist | July 4, 2006It's the 4th of July, and the Mad Biologist doesn't work on yontif, so here's something from the archives about scientific literacy (or illiteracy, actually). Surprisingly, I actually agree with Nicholas Kristof (originally published Dec. 8, 2005).
Nicholas Kristof actually made sense today. He described on the widespread ignorance of science and math, even among those typically considered well-educated. Says the Great Solon (italics mine):
One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not…
loom | July 3, 2006In today's New York Times I have an article about the discovery of a vast graveyard of dodo fossils. The fossils date back an estimated 3,000 years. Dodo fossils are exquisitely rare, and so it's quite something to find an entire assemblage of them. But as the leader of the expedition that found them told me, that discovery alone would have been scientifically unimportant. What matters is the entire package. The scientists found fossils of lots of other animals and plants. It wasn't just the dodo that went extinct on the island of Mauritius. It was an entire ecosystem, and these fossils may…
purepedantry | July 2, 2006The Family Guy has a great spoof on the religious interpretation of evolution.
pharyngula | June 30, 2006Once upon a time, as a young undergraduate, I took a course in neurobiology (which turned out to be rather influential in my life, but that's another story). The professor, Johnny Palka, took pains at the beginning to explain to his class full of pre-meds and other such riff-raff that the course was going to study how the brain works, and that we were going to be looking at invertebrates almost exclusively—and he had to carefully reassure them that flies and squid actually did have brains, very good brains, and that he almost took it as a personal offense when his students implied that they…
grrlscientist | June 29, 2006
Wild specimen of the butterfly species, Heliconius heurippa.
Researchers recently demonstrated that this species is a naturally-occurring
hybrid between H. cydno and H. melpomene.
Image: Christian Salcedo / University of Florida, Gainesville.
Speciation typically occurs after one lineage splits into two separate and isolated breeding populations. But it is has been hypothesized that two "parental" species with overlapping ranges could hybridize, thereby giving rise to one new but reproductively isolated "daughter species" in the same area. However, this phenomenon has rarely been observed…
clock | June 29, 2006Evolution's Lonely Battle in a Georgia Classroom:
OCCASIONALLY, an educational battle will dominate national headlines. More commonly, the battling goes on locally, behind closed doors, handled so discreetly that even a teacher working a few classrooms away might not know. This was the case for Pat New, 62, a respected, veteran middle school science teacher, who, a year ago, quietly stood up for her right to teach evolution in this rural northern Georgia community, and prevailed.
She would not discuss the conflict while still teaching, because Ms. New wouldn't let anything disrupt her…
scientificactivist | June 28, 2006Before I get started here, I have a quick announcement. Seed is seeking reader-submitted questions to ask its ScienceBloggers, so if you have a burning question (and I know you do), submit it to askablogger@seedmediagroup.com.
This week's (or last week's, rather) Ask a ScienceBlogger question is "What makes a good science teacher?" I probably put this one off for so long because there's so much to cover there. Since nobody wants to read a 5,000 word essay, and since I've pretty much missed the boat on this one anyway, I'll make this one short.
Most of the general qualities that make…
pharyngula | June 28, 2006
Maybe half of my audience here will be familiar with this problem. You're a man, and you're hauling this massive, ummm, package around in your pants everywhere you go. Other men fear you, while the women worship you…yet at the same time, your e-mail is stuffed to bursting with strange people making friendly offers to help you make it even bigger. It's a dilemma; you think you would be even more godlike if only it were larger, but could there possibly be any downside to it? (There is a bit of folk wisdom that inflating it drains all the blood from the brain, but this is clearly false. Men who…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2006Following up from yesterday's post about how knowledge about the biological basis for X doesn't tell us whether X is to be valued or pathologized, I need to put a few more points (including some questions) on the table.
First, in the comments thread to the Feministing post that prompted my post, a common (and frustrating) misunderstanding of claims from evolutionary biology has reared its head:
I wouldn't put the clitoris in the same catagory as the male nipple by any means. The clitoris is not a by-product, and by the way neither is sex. And "liking sex that does not result in reproduction…
clock | June 28, 2006
This is one a couple of posts about Creationism, written originally on May 1st, 2005.
Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology
I am not an "evolutionist". I am not a "Darwinist". I am a biologist. Thus, by definition, I am an evolutionary biologist. Although my research is in physiology and behavior, I would never be able to make any sense of my data (or even know what questions to ask in the first place) without evolutionary thinking.
As I am also interested in history and philosophy of biology, I consider myself a Darwinian. But not a "Darwinist" or "evolutionist" - those…
pharyngula | June 27, 2006
One of many open questions in evolution is the nature of bilaterian origins—when the first bilaterally symmetrical common ancestor (the Last Common Bilaterian, or LCB) to all of us mammals and insects and molluscs and polychaetes and so forth arose, and what it looked like. We know it had to have been small, soft, and wormlike, and that it lived over 600 million years ago, but unfortunately, it wasn't the kind of beast likely to be preserved in fossil deposits.
We do have a tool to help us get a glimpse of it, though: the analysis of extant organisms, searching for those common features that…
clock | June 27, 2006
The origin and early evolution of circadian clocks are far from clear. It is now widely believed that the clocks in cyanobacteria and the clocks in Eukarya evolved independently from each other. It is also possible that some Archaea possess clock - at least they have clock genes, thought to have arived there by lateral transfer from cyanobacteria.[continued under the fold]
It is not well known, though, if the clocks in major groups of Eukarya - Protista, Plants, Fungi and Animals - originated independently or out of a common ancestral clock. On one hand, the internal logic of the clock…
loom | June 26, 2006Last night I took the ferry across Long Island Sound to spend the day in Stony Brook at Evolution 2006, the joint annual meeting of American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. About 1500 scientists were there, and there were enough talks going on--often simultaneously--to keep me in constant motion from eight in the morning till eleven at night.
The presentations were all over the map. In one study, scientists were pinpointing the molecular changes that Southwestern Indians have acquired to their cells as they adapted to…
mikethemadbiologist | June 26, 2006While I'm away, I'll leave you with this introduction to likelihood theory (originally published Nov. 22, 2005).
In the Washington Post last week, Charles Krauthammer boldly opposed the Tin Foil Helmet wing of the Republican Party by calling intelligent design a "fraud." The best part of his column was when he pointed out that, just like biology, chemistry and physics are also godless:
The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernible direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided…
razib | June 25, 2006In reference to my previous post about multi-level selection, I have an admission to make, I am generally more open to group selection, strictly speaking interdemic selection, for human beings than I am for other creatures. The reasoning is culture, as my intuition is that ingroup vs. outgroup psychological dynamics can generate the relatively high ratio of intergroup vs. intragroup variance that is needed for this form of selection to keep up with within group selection (e.g., individual selection). To some extent, I have been influenced by the book, Not by Genes Alone, a popularization of…