evolution
gregladen | August 17, 2009Biology is harder to learn than quantum physics. Why? Because most people think they totally get biology, but everyone knows nobody gets quantum physics. Therefore, any effort to explore quantum physics will result in new learning, but people rarely learn new biology. The bottom line is that our brains are full of biology, which would be good if most of it did not consist of falsehoods.
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The things that people know already often need to be removed from the brain prior to teaching new stuff. This may seem a little offensive to some, but really, it is easier to just admit it. I'm not…
edyong | August 17, 2009In a Swiss laboratory, a group of ten robots is competing for food. Prowling around a small arena, the machines are part of an innovative study looking at the evolution of communication, from engineers Sara Mitri and Dario Floreano and evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller.
They programmed robots with the task of finding a "food source" indicated by a light-coloured ring at one end of the arena, which they could "see" at close range with downward-facing sensors. The other end of the arena, labelled with a darker ring was "poisoned". The bots get points based on how much time they spend near…
laelaps | August 17, 2009
Osborn's view of the progressive evolution of the brontotheres. Notice the references to the "geneplasm" at left, which Osborn interpreted as spontaneously giving rise to new adaptations. From Osborn (1935).
Every now and then I like taking a break from the latest technical papers and conference volumes to read some vintage scientific work. Oftentimes this is an enjoyable experience, I love the history of science, but the evolutionary work of H.F. Osborn is frustratingly opaque. While Osborn certainly was one of the most prominent figures in early 20th century paleontology he cultivated…
emjohnson | August 17, 2009Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "Where there's marriage without love there will be love without marriage." His affairs are well known in American history, however this founding father may have been stating a truth extending to evolutionary history as well.
Christopher Ryan (author of the forthcoming Sex at Dawn) offers some thoughts on the role of novelty in the sex lives of our favorite primate. He suggests that men are drawn to variety in sexual partners while women are drawn to variety in technique:
When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they…
grrlscientist | August 16, 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…
dgmacarthur | August 16, 2009A useful reminder for evolutionary biologists and science journalists, posted to the Evoldir list by Joel Parker:
I have noticed many evolutionary biologists making an embarrassing mistake of falsely attributing the first use of the tree analogy to Darwin. This has occurred in numerous documentaries and on websites which I will pass on naming here. Ironically, the earliest use of the tree analogy diagram to depict evolution was published in the year of Darwin's birth (1809) by Lamarck in his book Philosophie Zoologique (see pg 463, http://tinyurl.com/knt7vr). Lamarck even uses botanical…
razib | August 13, 2009Below I pointed to the rise in acceptance of evolution among the young, in particular the 18-30 cohort. There were some natural questions about other correlated demographic variables (I did point to data suggesting that this is not simply a byproduct of increased secularity of the young). Naturally one wonders about the impact of education. There's a problem with this: people who are 22 are far less likely to have graduate degrees than people who are 40, because most people are just finishing their undergraduate degree at this age! The comparison isn't fair (additionally, the reduction in the…
razib | August 13, 2009The use of the word "Darwinist" is to catch the attention of Creationists, normally I'm not too warm to its usage in a scientific (as opposed to philosophical or historical) context. In any case, Jerry Coyne has a post up where he states:
The "new atheists" have been on the scene for exactly five years, beginning with Sam Harris's The End of Faith, published in 2004. But American's attitudes to evolution have been relatively unchanged (with 40+% denying it) for twenty-five years. This means two things.
This is true to a first approximation, and rather depressing. So I thought I would…
ejohnson | August 10, 2009
Were our human ancestors ocean-dwelling? In a TED talk on Greg Laden's Blog, writer Elaine Morgan makes the case that human traits like subcutaneous fat, nearly hairless skin, and bipedalism—traits which distinguish us from chimpanzees and other close relatives—evolved during an aquatic stage in human history. ScienceBloggers, however, spare little belief for this Aquatic Ape hypothesis. On Pharyngula, PZ Myers says that there is "no evidence anywhere for such a stage." And Greg Laden points out that while no current hypothesis for human evolution is flawless, this one in particular doesn't…
grrlscientist | August 9, 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…
gregladen | August 5, 2009..that even when you try diligently to separate the politics of religion vs. creationism and to say again and again that religion can go along its merry way as long as it stays out of the science classroom, people like Casey Luskin will still find the words in your rhetoric to accuse you of attacking religion.
Back in May, Genie Scott appeared with me and Lynn Fellman on Atheist Talk Radio, where we discussed science education. Genie is the director of the National Center for Science Education.
In a recent posting on the Discovery Institute web site, Casey Luskin makes the contrast between…
pharyngula | August 4, 2009
We miss something important when we just look at the genome as a string of nucleotides with scattered bits that will get translated into proteins — we miss the fact that the genome is a dynamically modified and expressed sequence, with patterns of activity in the living cell that are not readily discerned in a simple series of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. What we can't see very well are gene regulatory networks (GRNs), the interlinked sets of genes that are regulated in a coordinated fashion in cells and tissues.
What this means is that if you look within a specific cell type at a specific gene, its…
grrlscientist | August 4, 2009
Who: Josh Rosenau, policy analyst at the National Center for Science Education
What: free public presentation, "Adventures in the Defense of Evolution: From Kansas to Turkey to New York"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor.
When: 700pm, Tuesday, 4 August
"That's not a problem here, right?," New Yorkers ask when they hear what Josh Rosenau does for a living. Rosenau is a policy analyst at the National Center for Science Education, where he defends the teaching of evolution against creationism. He and his colleagues have tracked attacks on…
gregladen | August 4, 2009The Aquatic Ape Theory is being discussed over at Pharyngula. As PZ points out, an excellent resource on this idea is Moore's site on the topic. Here, I just want to make a few remarks about it.
The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) is a human evolution Theory of Everything (TOE) and thus explains, as it should, everything. That is a dangerous way for a theory to act, because if it tries to explain everything then it is going to be wrong in a number of places, and it is going to seem (or even be) right in a number of places but only by chance. (Unless, of course, the TOE is totally rad and really…
pharyngula | August 4, 2009I'm getting a lot of email asking me to talk about the aquatic ape theory, the idea that humans went through a semi-aquatic stage in their evolutionary history. It's complete nonsense; its proponents spew out a lot of inconsistent and mutually contradictory noise to 'support' their claims, and there is no evidence anywhere for such a stage. I don't need to say more, though, because Jim Moore's Aquatic Ape page is the definitive web resource for dissecting this fringe theory.
edyong | August 3, 2009Swine flu has made the world all too aware of the possibility of diseases making the leap from animal hosts to human ones. Now, we know that another disease made a similar transition from chimpanzees to humans, several thousand years ago. This particular infection is caused by a parasite, and a very familiar and dangerous one - Plasmodium falciparum, the agent responsible for malaria.
Transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes, P.falciparum infects over 500 million people every year. Its closest relative is a related parasite, Plasmodium reichenowi, which infects chimpanzees. Leading an…
kthompson | August 3, 2009Folks at UCLA have created a list of evolutionary winners and losers. They've based this list on a species' ability to diversify over time. At the top of the winners list are birds (with 9,000 species) and mammals (with 5,400 species). Compare that speciation with big fat losers like crocodiles and alligators. Crocs and gators have been evolving for 250 million years and have exactly 23 species to show for it.
One particular loser highlighted in the article is the tuatara, a native to New Zealand.
It looks like a lizard, but they claim it's more closely related to snakes. Believe what you…
grrlscientist | August 3, 2009
Who: Josh Rosenau, policy analyst at the National Center for Science Education
What: free public presentation, "Adventures in the Defense of Evolution: From Kansas to Turkey to New York"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor.
When: 700pm, Tuesday, 4 August
"That's not a problem here, right?," New Yorkers ask when they hear what Josh Rosenau does for a living. Rosenau is a policy analyst at the National Center for Science Education, where he defends the teaching of evolution against creationism. He and his colleagues have tracked attacks on…
edyong | August 2, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
"Congratulations, it's a stunted, malformed, necrotic hybrid!" Those aren't really the words that new parents want to hear but thankfully, plants aren't in a position to be that upset.
In several species of plants, a surprising number of offspring turn out to be malformed hybrids that quickly wither and die. Now, Kirsten Bomblies and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology have found out why.
Two genes, one passed down by each parent, ignite an reaction in the hybrid…
grrlscientist | August 2, 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…