evolution
oracknows | May 22, 2006Geez, who could have seen this one coming?
Straight from the Discovery Institute's blog regarding atheist and Holocaust denier Larry Darby in reference to his activities against ID in Alabama, Casey Luskin bloviates:
An outspoken opponent of the bill has been activist Larry Darby. Mr. Darby's vehement opposition to the Alabama Academic Freedom Bill was on full display at a House Education hearing back on April 29, 2004. According to reports I have received, committee chair, Rep. Yvonne Kennedy (D), did not allow citizens to testify for the bill. But for some reason she let Mr. Darby alone…
jrosenhouse | May 19, 2006I have a new essay up at CSICOP's Creation Watch site. The subject: What is Science? Figured it was high time to polish off that little question once and for all. Enjoy!
pharyngula | May 19, 2006
Four of my favorite things are development, evolution, and breasts, and now I have an article that ties them all together in one pretty package. It's a speculative story at this point, but the weight of the evidence marshaled in support of the premise is impressive: the mammalian breast first evolved as an immunoprotective gland that produced bacteriocidal secretions to protect the skin and secondarily eggs and infants, and that lactation is a highly derived kind of inflammation response. That mammary glands may have had their origin as inflamed glands suppurating mucus may not be the most…
razib | May 18, 2006In the comments below in regards to the great evolutionary biologists, and the "Top 10 list," I received some good submissions. But, there is definitely (in my mind) a top tier which I am inflexible about.
Darwin - he basically invented the field as a science, made some darn good predictions (H. sapiens as an African species) and put forward ideas that are today being taken up again (sexual selection)
R.A. Fisher - Not only did he fuse Mendelian genetics with evolutionary biology ("biomemtrics"), and so lay the foundation for the Modern Synthesis, he is also the father of statistics
Sewall…
jrosenhouse | May 18, 2006As a follow-up to yesterday's post, have a look at Carl Zimmer's post on the subject. He provides a lot of the scientific specifics:
But that's not what has emerged from the new study. The Broad Institute scientists lined up millions of bases of DNA in humans and chimps and measured their differences. Humans and chimpanzees both inherited each segment of DNA from a common ancestor. Over time, the copies of that ancestral segment picked up mutations. The differences between them can offer clues to how long they've been evolving along separate paths. It turns out that the ancestors for some…
oracknows | May 18, 2006Enough, already!
Over the last couple of days, we've had Signs You Might Be an Intelligent Design Critic.
Next, we had You May Be an Intelligent Design Supporter If...
Just remember who got the ball rolling with these silly Jeff Foxworthy-inspired lists way back in January 2005 and updated it shortly after landing here at ScienceBlogs.
Alright, I'm a little envious. I wish I had thought of this list. I guess, though, I'll console myself with the fact that I do have one "You might be an X if..." sort of list to my credit.
And, I have to confess, I found a couple of these amusing, such as, "…
loom | May 18, 2006It's been a little over a year and a half now since scientists announced the disocvery of the most controversial fossil in the field of human origins: Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit. Scientists found bones of a dimunitive hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores, and estimated that it lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago. It stood about as high as a normal three year old human child and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee's. But its bones were also found with stone tools. The scientists declared the bones were not human. Instead, they belonged to a species of their own--one that…
razib | May 17, 2006Your nominations? Mine below....
Charles Darwin
R.A. Fisher
Sewall Wright
J.B.S. Haldane
Motoo Kimura
Ernst Mayr
Richard Lewontin
J. M. Smith
W.D. Hamilton
Theodosius Dobzhansky
I chose based on subjective criteria, and the individuals above differ a great deal. Lewontin has done good work, but mostly I put him on the list because I think the paper co-authored with Hubby in the 1960s was an inflection point which signalled the end a long period of torpidity. I don't think much of Mayr's theoretical projects (see the problems with his "genetic revolutions" or "founder flush" verbal models,…
razib | May 17, 2006Ah...busy with other things, and Evolgen pounced on this story of hybrdization in the midst of the split between the pre-human and pre-chimpanzee lineages 5-7 million years ago. Carl Zimmer offers some social perspective, while John Hawks tears into the science (tears, cuts and bludgeons, actually).
I don't know about the details of the science here, there is a lot of exciting hype. Talk of human-chimpanzee hybridization is trangressive and appeals to our folk mythologies of man-apes. I also know that only one chimpanzee fossil has been recovered, and the pre-Australopithecene history of…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2006The New York Times is reporting on new data concerning the date of the evolutionary split between the human and chimapnzee lineages:
Scientists are re-evaluating a pivotal event in human evolution, the split between the human and chimpanzee lineages, in light of a startling new comparison of the human and chimp genomes.
The new analysis, by David Reich, Nick Patterson and colleagues at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., sets up a serious conflict between the date of the split as indicated by fossil skulls and the much younger date implied by genetic analysis.
The conflict can be…
pharyngula | May 17, 2006Zimmer has a summary of the new analysis of the human and chimpanzee genomes that suggests that human speciation wasn't sudden (no surprise there, I don't think), and that our ancestors dallied with chimpanzee ancestors over a fairly prolonged period. I can't wait to read the creationist response to that!
I haven't read the paper yet—I'm still waist-deep in grading hell—but the deadline for grade submission is midnight tonight, and then at last I will be a free man again!
loom | May 17, 2006Nothing gets the blood boiling like a manimal. For many people, the idea of breaching the human species barrier--to mingle our biology with that of an animal--seems like a supreme affront to the moral order. In his January state of the union address, President Bush called for a ban on "creating human-animal hybrids."
These so-called chimeras, according to their opponents, devalue humanity by breaching our species barrier. "Human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale," Bush declared. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas expanded on…
razib | May 16, 2006Between 3 million & 200,000 years ago the average cranial capacity of this planet's dominant hominids increased along a upward trendline, in starts and stops. Bipedal apes went from having nearly chimp sized crania to one similar to modern human beings (Neandertals had larger brains that H. sapiens sapiens). Symbolic culture as we know it though seems to really explode (a.k.a. "The Great Leap Forward") between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. There have been many books on these issues. The Mating Mind, The Prehistory of the Mind and The Dawn of Human Culture hit many of the controversies…
jlynch | May 16, 2006Interesting research coming out of Arizona State University:
Researchers believe that dynamic regions of the human genome -- "hotspots" in terms of duplications and deletions -- are potentially involved in the rapid evolution of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are genetically determined.
Now, an international team of researchers, including a graduate student and an associate professor from Arizona State University, are finding similar hotspots in chimpanzees, which has implications for the understanding of genomic evolution in all species.
"We found that chimpanzees have…
loom | May 16, 2006The BBC has a short article on the first DNA isolated from a Neanderthal's nucleus. (Previous efforts have gotten DNA from their mitochondria, which are small energy-generating organelles.) The results, announced at a meeting, are the fruits of a new method for extracting genetic information from fossils. Theoretically it should be possible to pull together a lot of pieces of Neanderthal DNA into something approaching a genome. We'll have to wait for the big paper for the details, but these early clues suggest it will be worth the wait.
Update: More from John Hawks here.
grrlscientist | May 15, 2006I have never owned a television in my life and I have (so far!) steadfastly refused all offers of free TVs, which, I suppose, effectively makes me into a conversational wasteland according to modern American conversation standards.
But honestly, there are times when I wish I did have my own TV .. times such as the college basketball playoffs, the Triple Crown of American horse racing, the Presidential Debates, college football season, Law and Order reruns and, as of last night .. The Simpsons. But thanks to the magic of divine intervention in the form of my new neighbor's free access…
cmooney | May 15, 2006I'm going to be in New York next monday for what looks like a great panel on "intelligent design":
"Intelligent Design" under the Microscope
An evening of presentations on the controversial movement. What is the history of the movement? What are its scientific claims? What impact will it have on our schools? Hear speakers from the fields of science, journalism, theology, and law. Co-organized by Science & the Arts and the Center for Inquiry. Supported in part by the Albert and Lin Bildner Foundation. Monday, May 22, 5-9pm Free
This will be taking place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 356…
oracknows | May 14, 2006Let me just take this opportunity to welcome one of my favorite evolution bloggers, Jason Rosenhouse, over to the ScienceBlogs fold. I've been following his blog for many months now.
Go say hi to him at his new location at EvolutionBlog, and don't forget to update your bookmarks (which reminds me, I'll have to update my own blogroll; there are some out of date entries there and I've been meaning to clean it up anyway). I sincerely hope Jason's transition goes more smoothly than mine did.
In case you weren't aware, there will soon be several more bloggers joing Jason and us here at…
razib | May 14, 2006I welcome Jason Rosenhouse to SB. But, I take issue with the way he frames the issue of politics & evolution. He states:
People like Shapiro, George Will, or Charles Krauthammer are lonely voices in the conservative wilderness, accorded about as much respect in the Republican party as pro-lifers are in the Democratic party. Every conservative politican of any prominence is anti-Darwin, and virtually every right-wing media outlet publishes anti-evolution articles on a regular basis. Indeed, as Chris Mooney documented at book length, hostility towards science is an integral part of…
razib | May 14, 2006Seeing as this is Mother's Day, I want to point to this working paper, Menopause and post-generative longevity: Testing the 'stopping-early' and 'grandmother' hypotheses. It is a 44 page review of a lot of literature that is out there. The short of it is that menopause is something of a mystery, our nearest relatives, the chimps, seem to be rather normal animals in that the female reproductive lifespan is coterminus with the whole of her life after sexual maturation. In contrast, human females engage in a proactive "shut down" of reproductive capacity. Not only that, after menopause they…