evolution
jdupuis | February 13, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This group review is from October 12, 2008.
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A few books that I've read in 2008 that haven't quite made it into their own reviews:
Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. New York: Picador…
sporte | February 9, 2011Have you ever wondered if creationism was intelligently designed?
Most of my colleagues tend to dismiss creationism as generally nutty and not worth bothering about. But, every now and then, we did get the odd situation with a few students who disagree or state legislatures that get a little confused about the definition of science.
This video lecture is a bit long, but definitely interesting.
tfk | February 6, 2011Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.
Totally awesome. Via BoingBoing.
mikethemadbiologist | February 2, 2011Does failing to teach evolution qualify as bad teaching? Because, then, I might get behind the idea that teacher tenure should fall by the wayside:
Now several Republican governors have concluded that removing ineffective teachers requires undoing the century-old protections of tenure.
Governors in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and New Jersey have called for the elimination or dismantling of tenure. As state legislatures convene this winter, anti-tenure bills are being written in those states and others. Their chances of passing have risen because of crushing state budget deficits that…
pharyngula | January 29, 2011Looking for a nice demonstration of genetic algorithms? Here's a simulation that takes randomized connected collections of polygons and wheels and scores them for their ability to traverse a rugged 2D landscape. I tried it last night, and it gave me an assortment of very bad vehicles: for example, a lot of them were just polygonal lumps that fell flat and sat there, while some had an odd wheel here and there, but also pointy bits that acted as brakes, or wheels that pointed upward at the sky and did nothing at all. So I just left it running and went to bed.
This morning, I've got strange…
jtoney | January 27, 2011
What do Biology teachers teach our children? This has been an ongoing subject of discussion by my Scibling PZ Meyers for years. I would like to add a comment, based on a paper in this week's Science.
A study just published in Science indicates that while creationism may have been defeated in the courtroom, it is still a matter of contention in the classroom. The authors refer to a portion of biology teachers as the "cautious 60%":
majority of teachers, the "cautious 60%," who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives?…
jtoney | January 26, 2011
Source.
"L" and alliterations thereof, turns out to have immense importance in literature and science. Science and art can co-exist. Surprised? Let me explain.
The creator of the infamous character "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov, turns out to have been not only one of the most influential writers of the past century, but to have been an amateur scientist with keen insight into evolution, recently validated by modern DNA technologies.
"Lolita" is a novel that has been revered, reviled as pornography, banned and studied by scholars since its publication in 1958. I am in no way qualified to…
mikethemadbiologist | January 25, 2011Last week, I mentioned how NY Times op-ed columnist and economist Paul Krugman has finally had his 'creationist moment': "the epiphany one realizes that, to creationists, words have no meaning, that they are not being honest." Well, a reader points us to yesterday's post on Krugman's blog, "The War on Demand." Krugman knocks down the arguments that the current depression isn't a result of inadequate demand, but what's really interesting is what he writes near the end:
It's kind of shocking if you think about it. Here we have a huge, hard-won intellectual achievement [the recognition that…
pharyngula | January 21, 2011That's what I do, after all. I strongly criticized his uncritical analysis of a set of rape-related evolutionary psychology studies, and now he responds with a rebuttal. It's not a very good rebuttal, but I highly recommend his second paragraph in which he lists a good collection of links to several people who also ripped into his article. That part is excellent!
But then let's get into the part where he argues with me.
P.Z. Myers is not, of course, the undisputed public ambassador of his discipline (although I've no doubt he sees himself as such), and by no means does the following apply to…
pharyngula | January 17, 2011There are days when I simply cannot bear the entire field of evolutionary psychology: it's so deeply tainted with bad research and a lack of rigor. And that makes me uncomfortable, because the fundamental premise, that our behaviors are a product of our history, is self-evidently true. It's just that researchers in this field couple an acceptance of that premise to a deep assumption of adaptive teleology, the very thing that they should be evaluating, and produce some of the most awesomely trivial drivel.
I've just finished reading an article titled "Darwin's Rape Whistle: Have women evolved…
jtoney | January 13, 2011
Dino egg.
Awwww....
Just reported in this week's issue of Science:
A report of remains of a four foot dinosaur, ten to fifteen pounds, some 230 million years old. Perhaps not so sweet.
From The New York Times:
the little dinosaur was also a fleet-footed meat eater, with an agile body and long canines that were ideal for digging into prey.
From the paper's Abstract in Science:
Upper Triassic rocks in northwestern Argentina preserve the most complete record of dinosaurs before their rise to dominance in the Early Jurassic. Here, we describe a previously unidentified basal theropod,…
sa smith | January 10, 2011There is some percentage of the population who have a better prognosis if infected with HIV-1 than the rest of us. Remember those pirate flags and sombreros I talk about sometimes? Major histocompatibility complexes, type I. Some people put up HIV-1 flags that are easily recognizable as 'NOT SELF!!' to their cytotoxic T-cells, so they (sometimes) can control the virus better, thus are slower to progress to AIDS than people with different MHC I alleles.
You notice the (sometimes) in parentheses up there.
Having a 'protective' MHC I allele just means that you have ~50%:50% chance of not…
pharyngula | January 10, 2011Have you got kids? Are you tangentially related to any young people? Are you young yourself? Do you know anyone who just likes a good story and interesting science?
Well, then, I'm sorry, but reading this article will cost you $12.89. Jay Hosler has a new book out (illustrated by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon), Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I'm afraid it's going to be required reading for everyone, and you're also all probably going to end up buying multiple copies for gifts.
Really, it's that good. It's a comic book about aliens from Glargalia explaining…
oracknows | January 4, 2011Back in December, I took issue with a highly irritating article by someone who normally should know better, Jonah Lehrer, entitled The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With the Scientific Method?, so much so that I wrote one of my typical long-winded deconstructions of the article. One thing that irritated me was contained in the very title itself, namely the insinuation that the "decline effect," which is the tendency of effects observed in early scientific experiments demonstrating a phenomenon to "decline" or become less robust as more and more experiments are performed, is…
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Morphological variation is important, it's interesting…and it's also common. It's one of my major scientific interests — I'm actually beginning a new research project this spring with a student and I doing some pilot experiments to evaluate variation in wild populations here in western Minnesota, so I'm even putting my research time where my mouth is in this case. There has been some wonderful prior work in this area: I'll just mention a paper by Shubin, Wake, and Crawford from 1995 that examined limb skeletal morphology in a population of newts, and found notable variation in the wrist…
jtoney | January 4, 2011
Photo source.
I think that's what I'm trying to do," he says. "I think Darwin's life is a great story. So why not tell it as a great story?
NPR Interview with Jay Hosler, Feb. 14, 2005
Amidst the media storms about teaching evolution in the classroom, I wonder whether anyone considered using comics? It is such a simple, elegant idea. Comics can draw students into the subject, using humor and whimsy, in a way that is simply not possible using a textbook. Plus there's nothing like humor to throw water on a fierce debate between a self-righteous religious zealot and a town's school board.…
gregladen | January 3, 2011A discussion of misconceptions in evolution ... about missing links, or great chains of being, or teleology (the idea that evolution is goal-directed) has got to be the most fun you can have with your pants on. Pursuant to this, let's sharpen and clarify our evolutionary theory mojo by considering the concept of "mosaic evolution" ... what is it, and what isn't it?
Of course, the concept of mosaic evolution, meant to clarify how evolution works, is often itself misunderstood. From Wikipedia:
"Mosaic Evolution is the concept that major evolutionary changes tend to take place in stages, not…
pharyngula | December 31, 2010This topic came up earlier this week: creationists are always yammering about the "missing link" and how it's missing and therefore evolution is unsupported by the evidence. It's total nonsense, since evolution doesn't predict a "missing link", but it seemed worthwhile to explain why, since there was a recent publication of some exciting data that demonstrates the real complexity of the situation.
Jim Foley and John Hawks and Carl Zimmer have written up the story of the Denisovans. To summarize, another group of Pleistocene humans have been sequenced, called the Denisovans — their identity is…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2010I am on the mailing lists of a number of creationist organizations, including the Access Research Network. A few days ago I received a postcard from them. It opens with the following, encouraging paragraph:
The economy has taken its toll on us here at ARN with our donations and product sales this year less than half of what they were two years ago. In order to cut costs we are mailing out this post card rather than our Annual Report.
It made my day to read that. Of course, one suspects it is not just the bad economy that has cut into their sales and donations. It is also the fact that…
pharyngula | December 28, 2010
My direct experience with prokaryotes is sadly limited — while our entire lives and environment are profoundly shaped by the activity of bacteria, we rarely actually see the little guys. The closest I've come was some years ago, when I was doing work on grasshopper embryos, and sterile technique was a pressing concern. The work was done under a hood that we regularly hosed down with 95% alcohol, we'd extract embryos from their eggs, and we'd keep them alive for hours to days in tissue culture medium — a rich soup of nutrients that was also a ripe environment for bacterial growth. I was…