evolution
evolgen | January 26, 2006To be filed under: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
My name is not Inigo Montoya. You did not kill my father. And I couldn't care less if you died or not. But give me a god damn break here people. If you want to ask a question, then ask the question. There is no reason to not ask the question.
What question am I talking about? As Chris and John have pointed out, the Brits ain't down with evolution. According to the BBC:
"More than half the British population does not accept the theory of evolution, according to a survey.
"Furthermore, more…
cmooney | January 26, 2006Allegedly the British populace is not nearly so pro-evolution as one might assume. That's the finding of a survey just released in connection with a BBC special, but I'm a bit skeptical of the results in at least one respect.
The survey asked over 2000 participants what best described their view of the origin and development of life, whereupon 22 percent chose creationism, 17 percent chose intelligent design, and 48 percent chose evolution. (The rest were, as usual, clueless.) Now, I suspect that perceptive readers of this blog will have already noticed the problem with this data. That's…
cmooney | January 26, 2006It has been widely noted that U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, who's in electoral trouble in 2006, has been distancing himself from his old buddies in the ID movement. Santorum has flip flopped on the closely linked questions of whether ID counts as science and whether it should be taught in public school classes, and he's backed away from the Dover case (which was set in his home state). But Santorum isn't going to get off that easy.
The senator's close ties to the ID movement remain, and they're fully in evidence at this link. It goes to the Amazon.com page for a forthcoming book celebrating the…
loom | January 25, 2006I've got an article in tomrrow's New York Times about the discovery of a remarkable case of convergence: an ancient relative of today's crocodiles and alligators that evolved a dinosaur's body--80 million before the dinosaurs evolved it. Here's the paper.
Update, 1/26 7 am: Here's Seth Sean Murtha's nice sketch of Effigia okeeffeae. A bigger version is here.
Update, 2/1 9 am: Be sure to check out Carl Buell's croc gallery.
loom | January 25, 2006My review of the Darwin show at the American Museum of Natural History is in the new issue of Discover. You can read the full text here.
grrlscientist | January 24, 2006
Okay guys, if you had a choice between having a big brain or big .. er, testes .. which would you choose?
A recent scientific paper reveals that as sexual selection pressures increase in promiscuous bat species, males evolve larger testes and smaller brains. But in bat species where females remain faithful, males had comparatively smaller testes and larger brains. Conversely, male sexual behavior had absolutely no effect on either brain or testes size.
Because brains and testis are the most metabolically expensive tissues to grow and maintain, the balance between their relative sizes…
cmooney | January 24, 2006PZ caught Kurt Vonnegut mouthing pro-ID nonsense recently. This is deeply depressing. Myers attributes it to Vonnegut getting pretty old and addled, but I'm not so sure.
Back in 1998, Vonnegut showed up at Yale University for a master's tea at my college, Silliman. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I remember him making a remark about rattlesnakes that suggested that he thought in a "design" sort of way. I don't recall precisely what Vonnegut said, or what question he was responding to. But I distinctly remember him likening rattlesnake fangs to syringes, in that they are ideally "…
pharyngula | January 24, 2006
First, a tiny bit of quantitative morphological data you can find in just about any comparative anatomy text:
mammal
number of vertebrae
cervical
thoracic
lumbar
sacral
caudal
horse
7
18
6
5
15-21
cow
7
13
6
5
18-20
sheep
7
13
6-7
4
16-18
pig
7
14-15
6-7
4
20-23
dog
7
13
7
3
20-23
human
7
12
5
5
3-4
The number of thoracic vertebrae varies quite a bit, from 9 in a species
of whale to 25 in sloths. The numbers of lumbar, sacral, and more caudal vertebrae also show considerable variation. At the same time, there is a surprising amount of invariance in the number of cervical…
cmooney | January 23, 2006The latest attempt to create sparks over science and religion came on Sunday in the New York Times book review. There, Judith Shulevitz wrote a subtle but ultimately very troubling piece that largely points the finger at scientists themselves for spurring on the evolution conflict. John Rennie goes to town on the article here, and he does a more extensive job than I plan on doing. Still, I was bothered by certain aspects of Shulevitz's article, and I'd like to explain further why.
If I had to guess, I'd say that Shulevitz is writing in what I like to call "counterintuitive mode." This is…
razib | January 23, 2006Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine who is a graduate student at a university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the department of "Organismic and Evolutionary Biology." My friend asserted that most people within her department are dumb, overbearing, arrogant and uninformed. Her concern was that this was within a department specializing in evolutionary theory at the nation's elite university!
Then we got to talking about Intelligent Design, and I mentioned how a link from The Corner resulted in an influx of Intelligent Design proponents on my other weblog. Now, as a kid growing up in…
cmooney | January 23, 2006Some of you may have seen that there is a vampire-werewolf movie in theaters starring Kate Beckinsale. The title is seriously disturbing: Underworld Evolution. I haven't seen the movie yet, although it sounds like my kind of trash. But how much do you want to bet that it misuses or distorts the scientific concept of evolution? If I know anything about these schlocky films (and I do, having seen far too many of them), I'd say the chances are quite high......
evolgen | January 22, 2006Are There Disagreements Between the Fossil Record and Molecular Data?
Molecular biologists have a tradition of reworking a lot of the evolutionary relationships and timescales that morphologists and paleontologists worked so hard to figure out. This can really piss off the non-molecular folks, but I prefer to think of it as a cooperative relationship. The molecular clock, for example, would not be possible without calibration from the fossil record. It is important to note that molecular and morphological data tell two different stories, which I outline below the fold . . .
When I wrote…
evolgen | January 20, 2006The first thing I think when I read the title to this post is, "Man, that's a long friggen title, and it's not at all catchy." The next thing I think is, "I thought I said I wasn't going to write about ecology." Well, I actually wrote:
"I am in no way, shape, or form an organismal biologist nor am I an ecologist, and if you catch me out of my element, by all means, please set me straight."
So, I invite you to put me in place if I'm talking out of my ass. But why would I write about an ecological concept like interspecific competition? This actually stems from a course that I am TAing…
cmooney | January 20, 2006I went and saw a movie the other night, and in the process also wound up seeing an ad that I'm sure many of you are familiar with. It's for Coca Cola, and it involves cute penguins and surprisingly benign polar bears getting together to enjoy fizzy beverages at the North Pole.
Now, the conceit of polar bears and penguins being buddies--rather than the former devouring the latter--is ridiculous enough. But let that pass; this is, after all, a cartoonish ad campaign obviously aimed at kids.
What troubles me more, though, is the blatant ignorance the ad both embodies, and spreads, about…
cmooney | January 20, 2006There's a very interesting, lengthy editorial about politics and science in the journal Cell by Paul Nurse, the president of Rockefeller University. Nurse articulates the scientific community's standard complaint about levels of research funding, but also goes much farther, dealing with the "intelligent design" issue as well as other political attacks on science. I particularly appreciated Nurse's stand on ID and the National Institutes of Health:
When the NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, was asked by Science magazine whether he was personally concerned about the Intelligent Design movement…
pharyngula | January 19, 2006
Nematostella, the starlet anemone, is a nifty new model system for evo-devo work that I've mentioned a few times before—in articles on "Bilateral symmetry in a sea anemone" and "A complex regulatory network in a diploblast"—and now I see that there is a website dedicated to the starlet anemone and a genomics database, StellaBase. It's taking off!
pharyngula | January 19, 2006
Variation is common, and often lingers in places where it is unexpected. The drawing to the left is from West-Eberhard's Developmental Plasticity and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and illustrates six common variations in the branching pattern of the aortic arch in humans. These are differences that have no known significance to our lives, and aren't even visible except in the hopefully rare situations in which a surgeon opens our chests.
This is the kind of phenomenon in which I've become increasingly interested. I work with a model system, the zebrafish, and supposedly one of the…
cmooney | January 19, 2006It's good to have friends. In this case, specifically, Jason Rosenhouse, who has taken on a few of my critics for me.
The gist is this: Some conservatives, in response to my arguments in The Republican War on Science, have been trying to make it look as though "intelligent design" is not so heavily backed by the GOP. For instance, Rosenhouse cites Adam Keiper in National Review, who has argued that "Conservatives are not politically unified in, not especially motivated by, and in a great many cases simply annoyed at, the intelligent-design debate." He also cites Kevin Shapiro in Commentary,…
pharyngula | January 19, 2006
There's a lovely article in this week's Nature documenting a transitional stage in tetrapod evolution (you know, those forms the creationists like to say don't exist), and a) Nature provides a publicly accessible review of the finding, and b) the primary author is already a weblogger! Perhaps there will come a day when I'm obsolete and willl just have to turn my hand to blogging about what I had for lunch.
For an extra super-duper dose of delicious comeuppance, though, take a look at this thread on the Panda's Thumb. I wrote about Panderichthys, and a creationist ("Ghost of Paley") comes…
cmooney | January 18, 2006We hardly knew ya! In the long history of American monkey trials, your rather puny attempt to undermine evolution--the case was quickly settled in our favor once the inevitable legal threat came down--may be worthy of a footnote. Or maybe not. It really depends on whether or not other creationists try to adopt your strategy of packaging anti-evolutionism in the guise of a philosophy class, rather than a science class.
Still, let's count down your errors. You made the same mistake that creationists always make: Wearing your religion on your sleeve. The teacher of your now-infamous course even…