evolution
pharyngula | February 8, 2006a, b, Cranial reconstruction in left lateral (a; shaded area indicates the unpreserved portion) and dorsal (b) views. adc, anterodorsal concavity; al, anterior lamina; an, angular; aof, antorbital fenestra; d, dentary; dg, dentary groove; emf, external mandibular fenestra; en, external naris; if, infratemporal fenestra; isf, foramen on ischium; j, jugal; jp, pneumatic jugal foramen; l, lacrimal; m, maxilla; mc I–IV, metacarpals I–IV; mo, maxillary opening; mt I–V, metatarsals I–V; mvc, median vertical crest; nc, nasal crest; obf, obturator foramen; orb, orbit; pf, prefrontal; pfe, pneumatic…
loom | February 8, 2006The movie Flock of Dodos, which takes a look at the evolution-creationism struggle, will have a free showing on Monday in New Haven, Connecticut. I'll be there as part of a panel discussion after the movie, moderated by Michael J. Donoghue, the director of Yale's Peabody Museum. The panel will also include Randy Olson, the director of "Flock of Dodos"' John Hare, a theologian at the Yale Divinity School; and Richard Prum, a Yale evolutionary biologist who specializes on the evolution of birds. Not having seen the movie, I can't offer a review, but I certainly am curious to see it.
Details…
pharyngula | February 8, 2006Here's some very cool news: scientists have directly observed the evolution of a complex, polygenic, polyphenic trait by genetic assimilation and accommodation in the laboratory. This is important, because it is simultaneously yet another demonstration of the fact of evolution, and an exploration of mechanisms of evolution—showing that evolution is more sophisticated than changes in the coding sequences of individual genes spreading through a population, but is also a consequence of the accumulation of masked variation, synergistic interactions between different alleles and the environment,…
loom | February 8, 2006Dinosaur paleontologists don't look for fossils simply because dinosaurs are cool. They want to solve evolutionary mysteries. Like all living things, dinosaurs form groups of species. You've got your long-necked sauropods, your head-shield-sporting ceratopsians, and so on. The distinctiveness of a group can make it difficult to determine how it evolved from an ancestor. Whales may be mammals (they nurse their young, for example), but they're all fish-shaped.
Some of the best clues to the origins of these groups come from transitional fossils, which are formed by species that evolved some,…
cmooney | February 7, 2006PZ disagrees with my suggestions about strategies for defending evolution. More specifically, he disagrees that we should be using, as messengers, scientists who reconcile faith and evolution (aka Ken Miller) to reach the broader American public. As PZ puts it:
Why, sure. And the ideal messenger to reach the public on Democratic ideals is a moderate Republican. The way to win friends and persuade people is to dilute your message so much that you sound just like them. Baa-aaa-aa-a.
Ah, but are we diluting our message here? I don't think that we are. The goal, for me, is to "defend the teaching…
grrlscientist | February 6, 2006When Pittsburgh paleontologist Matt Lamanna jokingly promised his fellow scientists that he would eat a duck foot if they unearthed a rare bird fossil, he never expected that they would discover a large group of them in northwest China. This discovery, the most significant in the past 25 years, was made in the Changma Basin, a desert located more than 1,000 miles away from the famed Liaoning fossil quarries.
"The dinosaur-bird transition is the hottest topic in dinosaur paleontology," says Lamanna.
Some evolutionary biologists think that birds and dinosaurs are too different to be directly…
razib | February 6, 2006What is a hill? I mean, how do you define a hill as opposed to a mountain, or, flat, level ground. The reality is that all surfaces on the planet which aren't artificial seem to have discontinuities and wrinkles on the macroscale.1 Here is a dictionary definition:
A well-defined natural elevation smaller than a mountain.
That is rather vague. Is a small mound of dirt that my cousin made a "hill." And what is a mountain? Here is a definition:
A natural elevation of the earth's surface having considerable mass, generally steep sides, and a height greater than that of a hill.
Since a…
stcynic | February 6, 2006Feb. 12, 1809 was the day on which both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born. Though we now celebrate Lincoln's birthday on President's Day, Feb. 12th is still referred to as Darwin Day and celebrated around the world. This Sunday, it will be celebrated in churches as well. The same folks who put together the Clergy Letter Project, a letter supporting evolution signed by over 10,000 clergy, have organized over 400 churches to celebrate Darwin Day by teaching on the subject in church this Sunday. This is a very valuable project for reaching out to people who have been taught all their…
cmooney | February 5, 2006More and more, we're seeing top level reporters in the prestige press rejecting the concept of phony "balance," and exposing nonsense when they see it. A great example comes in a recent Times story covering debate over an anti-evolution bill in Utah:
The Utah bill's main sponsor, State Senator D. Chris Buttars, a Republican from the Salt Lake City suburbs, said he was not surprised by the debate it had inspired. He said ordinary voters were deeply concerned about the teaching of evolution.
"I got tired of people calling me and saying, 'Why is my kid coming home from high school and saying his…
razib | February 3, 2006One of the things that really pisses me off about the Evolution-Creation "debate" is that it uses up oxygen that could be profitably allotted to documenting the tsunami of data emerging out of the "post-genomic" era. The actual examination of evolution is not just an academic exercise, as much of the recent work coming out of laboratories deals with humans.1 For example, Dienekes points me to this preprint in The American Journal of Human Genetics, Spread of an inactive form of caspase-12 in humans due to recent positive selection:
...There is strong evidence for positive selection from…
cmooney | February 3, 2006Everyone is buzzing with the news that John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, has been elected the new majority leader in the House. So far, though, I have not seen any journalist ferret out this 2002 letter to the Ohio Board of Education (reported on here in the Post), in which Boehner teamed up with another Ohio Republican (Steve Chabot) to push an attack on evolution.
The Boehner-Chabot letter interprets the controversial Santorum Amendment as indicating the following: "Public school students are entitled to learn that there are differing scientific views on issues such as biological evolution…
evolgen | February 3, 2006Free Association (the Nature Genetics blog) has published a commentary from Laura Ranum, the senior author on the recent Abraham Lincoln ataxia paper. It begins:
In 1992 I received a phone call from a neurologist with an ataxia patient that had a strong family history of the disease. Impressed upon hearing there were at least eight affected family members, I asked if I could contact the patient directly. After talking to this woman about her family history she paused and said "but you know, you really ought to talk to my mother...I think she knows of some more cousins"; the SCA5 odyssey…
evolgen | February 2, 2006There are quite a few articles sitting around on my desktop waiting for me to write about them. It's gotten to the point where I just need to unload them on the blogosphere. Click through below the fold for some cool stuff from the scientific literature.
More on Neutrality from Laurence Hurst and Colleagues -- I just wrote about the nearly neutral theory, and here is an analysis of selection on silent sites in the human genome. Is this a coincidence or was this article subconsciously on my mind? From the abstract:
"At least in species with large populations, even synonymous mutations in…
evolgen | February 2, 2006I wrote previously about a couple of misconceptions in evolutionary genetics (random mutation and natural selection and decoding genomes). Razib and John Hawks have been rapping on genetic drift and neutrality. Razib thinks it's important to distinguish between molecular evolution and phenotypic evolution -- I agree, by the way, but drawing the line can be difficult. As John pointed out in another post on misconceptions, the one gene, one protein model is greatly flawed. However, there is a relationship between the genotype and the phenotype, and if much of molecular evolution can be…
evolgen | February 1, 2006As I mentioned before, you should definitely check out the Tangled Bank. This bi-week's issue is quite diverse (and all the astronomers seem to be talking about the "earth-like" planet). One entry comes from an extremely opinionated anthropologist who calls out quantitative geneticists:
Chimps More Like Humans Than Apes??? What does it mean to be human? And why quantitative geneticists should stick to their jobs.
Retarded Geneticists With No Understanding of the Word 'Phenotype' Mouth Off
[link]
More after the jump...
Well, I gotta say something about this, right?? I mean, I'm a retarded…
razib | January 31, 2006When I use terms not in regular circulation like linkage disequilibrium, or those which I suspect aren't as well understood as I think they should be, like random genetic drift, I usually make reference to the companion website to Mark Ridley's text Evolution (if you followed the links to the terms you will note this). If you have a little spare time you should check it out, it isn't too taxing. Of course, those with a strong lay interest in evolution might want to purchase Ridley's Oxford Reader anthology, Evolution. This is the closest thing to "airport reading" that I've seen that still…
pharyngula | January 31, 2006I've got a couple of posts that have been nominated for The 2005 Koufax Awards: Best Post, so I've quickly brought them on board here at the new site. Voting isn't yet open, but here they are:
Idiot America. This one is something of a howl of anguish, and it's really more a lot of quotes from Charles Pierce's article of the same name in Esquire. If this gets the nomination, credit should go more to Pierce than to me—and that's OK.
Planet of the Hats. This article is probably the best representation for how I actually feel about religion. It's all metaphor, but if you don't get it, I won't be…
pharyngula | January 31, 2006
Some people might think I'm a rather morbid fellow. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate lackey at the University of Washington and working at the med school, there, I made a wonderful discovery one lunch hour: a bone room. Tucked away in an odd corner of the building was a room full of shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, each one containing the bones of some individual who'd left their remains to science. They'd been thoroughly cleaned and disarticulated, and many had parts sawed apart so you could peer into the sinuses or the hollow spaces for marrow or poke around in the caverns of…
pharyngula | January 27, 2006Sometimes creationists say things like, "Evolution doesn't explain the origins of life!" The common reply is that that's the domain of abiogenesis, not evolution, with the implied suggestion that the creationist should go away and quit bugging us.
That's a cop-out.
I'm going to be somewhat heretical, and suggest that abiogenesis as the study of chemical evolution is a natural subset of evolutionary theory, and that we should own up to it. It's natural processes all the way back, baby, no miracles required. Life is chemistry, vitalism has evaporated and is one with phlogiston, and scientists…