evolution
gregladen | October 12, 2009What might have been a plausible idea in the 17th or 18th century is the starting point for a just published paper in PNAS.
Before you go read about it, I just want to say this: Having a system of publication in which some crap gets published is the cost of having a system of publication in which important stuff that does not happen to tickle the fancy of the publiconormative old guard GOB networkians does not get rejected.
I'm some will insist that we can have our cake (only good stuff gets published) and eat it too (and not good stuff gets not published) but that simply isn't true. And…
oracknows | October 11, 2009I may have been a bit hard on Richard Dawkins lately, but, if he believed in saints, Dawkins would deserve sainthood for keeping his cool in the face of so much concentrated idiocy coming from Bill O'Reilly:
A couple of lovely O'Reilly quotes:
"I'm throwing in with Jesus because you guys can't tell us how it all got here?"
"When you guys figure it out, then come back to me."
Then, of course, O'Reilly couldn't resist pulling out the "fascism" gambit.
Geez, I don't think I could have restrained myself as well as Richard Dawkins did with Bill O'Reilly. In the face of such blustery nonsense,…
grrlscientist | October 11, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
pharyngula | October 10, 2009Josh Timonen has put up a video of my talk at AAI. Tear into it!
One of the things I neglected to say more clearly, but should have, is that what I'm complaining about is the creationists' blithe conflation of complexity with order. We can build up immense amounts of complexity from nothing but noise, so just babbling about how complicated something is says nothing about the impossibility of its origin from chance events. Order, functionality, and, as Joe Felsenstein defined it, adaptedness are more relevant properties, and we have a natural mechanism for generating those, too. It's called…
pharyngula | October 9, 2009Perhaps I was too quick to declare that previous article the worst one yet on Ardipithecus…now the Family Research Council has weighed in. Would you believe that Ardi supports their anti-gay stance?
the article describes what C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent State University, says about the social organization of this species:
The males, he argues, pair-bonded with females. Lovejoy sees male parental investment in the survival of offspring as a hallmark of the human lineage.
So, how long has marriage (i.e., "pair-bonding") been a male-female union? About four million, four…
laelaps | October 9, 2009
Chucking stones at baboons; the first hominin passtime? From The Making of Man.
For the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, the fossilized bones scattered among the caves of South Africa were testimonies to the murderous nature of early humans. The recovered skulls of baboons and our australopithecine relatives often looked as if they had been bashed in, and Dart believed the bones, teeth, and horns of slain game animals were the weapons hominins used to slaughter their prey. (He gave this sort of tool use the cumbersome name "osteodontokeratic culture.") Our origins had not been peaceful;…
pharyngula | October 8, 2009Nicholas Wade has a very peculiar review of Richard Dawkins' book, The Greatest Show on Earth, in the NY Times Review of Books. It's strange because it is a positive review which strongly agrees with Dawkins' position on the central importance of the theory of evolution in biology in the first half…but the second half is a jaw-droppingly stupid attack on a small point in the book. Wade has a very absolutist and wrong view of the definitions of some terms, and he goes on and on, whining about a topic that he doesn't understand himself.
There is one point on which I believe Dawkins gets tripped…
jrosenhouse | October 8, 2009Richard Dawkins stopped by the NCSE the other day. Josh Rosenau writes:
And no, blog drama did not spill over into the real world. It was a great visit, with Dawkins and Genie getting along swimmingly.
Anyone surprised by this? Let's face it, the blog drama hasn't really been that dramatic, occasional whining from certain SciBlings notwithstanding.
laelaps | October 7, 2009
I have often been teased for my habit of carrying a science book wherever I go. ("That's such a Brian thing," an acquaintance once remarked.) If I am going to be waiting for someone or have a few minutes to spare here or there I like to have something to read to fill up the time. It's either that or fiddle around with Tetris on my cell phone. Some people have told me that this manifestation of bibliophilia makes me seem antisocial,* but I cannot break the habit. I have been toting around science stuff wherever I go from a very young age.
*[My favorite instance was when I was told to "Make…
grrlscientist | October 5, 2009tags: Tree of Life, conservation, biodiversity, ecology, evolution, biology, statistics, teaching, streaming video
This video presents a very brief glimpse into what I do as a professional researcher studying "my birds" -- the parrots of the South Pacific Ocean (during those rare and beautiful times when I actually have a job!!). To say the least, it fills me with intense longing to reclaim my long lost life.
grrlscientist | October 4, 2009tags: Tree of Life, conservation, biodiversity, ecology, evolution, biology, statistics, teaching, streaming video
This video presents a very brief glimpse into what I do as a professional researcher studying "my birds" -- the parrots of the South Pacific Ocean (during those rare and beautiful times when I actually have a job!!). It features interviews with one of the scientists whom I worked with when I was in grad school at the University of Washington: Scott Edwards, who now is at Harvard University. To say the least, this video fills me with intense longing to reclaim my long lost life…
grrlscientist | October 4, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
pharyngula | October 2, 2009One other exhibit in the hall was for Evolutionary Genealogy, an excellent site run by Len Eisenberg of Ashland, Oregon. I was in Ashland a while back and got a tour of the geology walk he installed there, which is phenomenal — look it up if you're ever in town.
He's selling posters and t-shirts to support his work in evolution education. One of the hooks he uses to get people interested is to talk about relationships in the great big family of life on earth, and he estimates the number of generations that separate us from any organism you might be interested in. He's got nice shirts that…
laelaps | October 2, 2009
Two restorations of "Ardi", a 45% complete skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus published in this week's issue of Science. Restorations (including the full skeletal restoration below) by artist Jay Matternes.
The stories of "Ida" and "Ardi" could hardly be more different.
Ida was a lemur-like primate that lived 47 million years ago in an area that is now Messel, Germany. Ardi was much closer to us; she was one of the earliest hominins and lived 4.4 million years ago in what would become known as Ethiopia.
When the bones of Ida were discovered they were held in a private collection for years…
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Been a while, so these cover a span of reading.
I'm in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful -- a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model, Alexander -- and this reconstruction a splendid read.
A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Ricks' The Gamble, an excellent account of the surge in Iraq. Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco, a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear:
The surge was not about more soldiers…
grrlscientist | October 1, 2009tags: science, Science is Real, They might be Giants, music video, streaming video
Here's a fun music video; "Science is Real" by the creative group, They Might be Giants. This is one of many wonderful songs on their new album "Here Comes Science."
You can order They Might be Giants' new album [CD/DVD], "Here Comes Science" from Amazon.
razib | October 1, 2009That's what Kambiz Kamrani is saying. Significance:
Owen Lovejoy is one of the authors of the paper, and he says that the fossil changes the notion that humans and chimps, our closest genetic cousins, both trace their lineage to a creature that was more like today's chimp and we'll have to be rewriting our text books soon. This is big folks. What this means is that our common ancestor was a bipedal forest forager and that chimps were an evolutionary offshoot.
Update: John Hawks & Carl Zimmer.
Update II: Science's Ardipithecus page is up. You can get the papers free with registration.
laelaps | October 1, 2009It's Ardipithecus day! No, not that one, but the other one, Ardipithecus ramidus, which paleoanthropologists have been studying for the past 15 years. Over 45% of the skeleton of this hominin was found in the early 1990's, but outside of a brief initial description no further details about Ardipithecus ramidus had been published until today.
Later this afternoon Science will launch a webpage containing multiple print articles and online features chock-full of details about this early hominin. (Word has it that an entire University of California Press volume will be devoted to Ardipithecus…
jrosenhouse | September 30, 2009Dawkins begins his case for evolution in the same place as Darwin himself: by discussing the myriad successes of plant and animal breeders. Whereas Darwin was very taken with pigeons, however, Dawkins prefers dogs, cabbages and cattle.
The chapter opens with a brief discussion of essentialism in biology, and how evolution shows it to be false. The following paragraph provides a well-written summary of the main point:
If there's a `standard rabbit', the accolade denotes no more than the centre of a bell-shaped distribution of real, scurrying, leaping, variable bunnies. And the distribution…
clock | September 30, 2009We are very excited to announce a new sponsor for ScienceOnline2010! It is National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). Among some other ways they will help the meeting get bigger and better than ever, the good folks at NESCent are also going to help two bloggers with travel costs to the conference. Read carefully how you can get one of these two grants:
Application deadline: December 1, 2009  Â
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Are you a blogger who is interested in evolution? The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is offering two travel awards to attend ScienceOnline2010, …