evolution
laelaps | May 12, 2009
At this moment there are more anti-creationism books available than I care to count. While they can be exciting for neophytes to dig into many repackage the same information and arguments over and over again, and they can quickly grow boring for those who have been following the creationism controversy closely. That is why I was excited to see that the new book For the Rock Record: Geologists on Intelligent Design was going to allow geologists and paleontologists to respond to creationist claims.
The primary difficulty with the volume, however, is that intelligent design does not have much…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2009Jerry Coyne offers some further thoughts on the Richard Lewontin essay I discussed in yesterday's post. Specifically, he addresses the question of why natural selection deserver pride of place among evolutionary mechanisms. He writes:
First of all, yes, it's true that the evidence for natural selection as the cause of most evolutionary change in the past is not as strong as the evidence that evolutionary change occurred. It cannot be otherwise. We can see evolution happening in the fossil record, but it is infinitely harder to parse out the causes of that change. We weren't around when…
clock | May 11, 2009Are you up to date on the hot debate in biology regarding how genes influence evolution? Some scientists contend genes are in the driver's seat. Others assign more pull to regulatory factors controlling genetic expression. At noon, Wednesday, May 27, come hear Duke biologist Greg Wray explore the importance of it all in a talk entitled "Hardware or Software: Searching for the Genetic Basis for Biological Diversity."
You may not want to miss this one. After Wray's talk, Pizza Talk embarks on its traditional three-month summer vacation. The next nine-month series debuts in September.
Sigma Xi…
jrosenhouse | May 11, 2009The current issue of The New York Review of Books features this essay, by Richard Lewontin. Officially it's a review of three recent books about Darwin and evolution. But since this is the NYRB we are discussing, the essay doesn't really say much about the books themselves.
The essay is disappointing, since for the most part I can't fathom Lewontin's point. Let's take a look:
Why do we call the modern theory of organic evolution “Darwinism”? Charles Darwin certainly did not invent the idea of evolution, that is, of the continuous change in time of the state of some system as a fundamental…
sa smith | May 11, 2009Shorter Luskin (comments, not in height): DIFRENT JEANS MAEK DIFRENT TREAHS TEHEREFORE JESUS!!! DIRP!
You know how we always laugh at the fact Creationists dont ever have degrees in biology? This illustrates one of the many, many times it would be handy for Caseytits to have taken a couple bio classes in college.
Darwins Tree of Life is a metaphor. It is very clearly a metaphor in Origin of Species:
The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing…
pharyngula | May 11, 2009David Perlman celebrates Darwin's birth year with a short list of evolutionary transitions. It's a strange thing; these kinds of examples are thick on the ground everywhere, published in the scientific literature every week, and somehow, the creationists never seem to be able to find them.
razib | May 11, 2009Dienekes reports on an abstracts for paper presentations at the ESHG 2009. This was is particularly interesting:
European Lactase Persistence Allele is Associated With Increase in Body Mass Index
J. A. Kettunen et al.
The global prevalence of obesity, usually indexed by body mass index (BMI) cut-offs, has increased significantly in the recent decades, mainly due to positive energy balance. However, the impact of a selection for specific genes cannot be excluded. Here we have tested the association between BMI and one of the best known genetic variants showing strong selective pressure: the…
evolvingthoughts | May 11, 2009Again, the press are talking about "the missing link". Let's get one thing clear. There is no missing link. Rather, there are an indefinite number of missing branches. To have a missing link, you need to visualise evolution as a chain. If there's a gap in the chain, then you have a missing link. But evolution, at least at the scale of animals and plants, is mostly a tree. And all we see are individual nodes of the tree, the extant species that form, in Darwin's metaphor, the leaves of the living tree, and the extinct species that form branching points deeper in the tree. But we do not have…
grrlscientist | May 10, 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…
sb admin | May 9, 2009
Although these two ants in northern Argentina look like they're ignoring each other, they are in fact doing just the opposite. This end-to-end confrontation is an intense chemical duel. What's particularly interesting about the image is the juxtaposition of two different defense systems.
At left is Forelius nigriventris, a speedy little insect armed with a nozzle at the tip of the abdomen that releases a chemical cocktail into the air. The Forelius colony discovered a breach in the mound of a neighboring fire ant Solenopsis invicta and has recruited hundreds of workers to pilfer the tasty…
pharyngula | May 9, 2009
I've been doing it wrong. I was looking over creationist responses to my arguments that Haeckel's embryos are being misused by the ID cretins, and I realized something: they don't give a damn about Haeckel. They don't know a thing about the history of embryology. They are utterly ignorant of modern developmental biology. Let me reduce it down for you, showing you the logic of science and creationism in the order they developed.
Here's how the scientific and creationist thought about the embryological evidence evolves:
Scientific thinking
An observation: vertebrate embryos show striking…
edyong | May 9, 2009
Immunity to viral infections sounds like a good thing, but it can come at a price. Millions of years ago, we evolved resistance to a virus that plagued other primates. Today, that virus is extinct, but our resistance to it may be making us more vulnerable to the present threat of HIV.
Many extinct viruses are not completely gone. Some members of a group called retroviruses insinuated themselves into our DNA and became a part of our genetic code. Indeed, a large proportion of the genomes of all primates consists of the embedded remnants of ancient viruses. Looking at these remnants is like…
evolvingthoughts | May 8, 2009There was a paper recently in PNAS on "The cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". A couple of bloggers, Epiphenom and I Am David, come to opposite conclusions. Epiphenom says that the study shows that religion is not a side-effect of the evolution of cognitive processes, while IAD says that is exactly what it shows.
The paper purports to show that when thinking about God or beliefs about God, the very same areas of the brain are used that are used in ordinary social interactions and so on:
The MDS results confirmed the validity of the proposed psychological structure of…
evolvingthoughts | May 8, 2009It's called Philosophy and Theory in Biology. This is based on some heavy hitters: Massimo Pigliucci, Jon Kaplan, Alan Love and Joan Roughgarden are the editors, and the editorial board looks like a Who's Who of philosophy of biology. No apparent page charges, and it's online only (I hope they take care of the enduring archiving), but it looks interesting. How it differs, apart from being virtualised, from Biology and Philosophy, Biological Theory and the several other more specialised journals I can't yet say.
mikethemadbiologist | May 7, 2009I've never understood how Bill Maher, who gets it so wrong on vaccination, gets it so right on evolution. Nonetheless, he hits this piece about evolution and influenza out of the park (except for referring to evolutionary biology as 'Darwinism'):
bcohen | May 7, 2009Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Martha McCaughey, discussing her book The Caveman Mystique, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: So how is the use of evolutionary psychology to explain masculine actions not just quackery? Evolutionary biologists, and many who read science blogs, rightly announce and discredit the quackery of creationists or, more broadly, those who "deny" scientific truths. But, for the sake of argumentative symmetry, can one put that lens back onto evolutionary psychology? Besides the caveman issue, does that field…
razib | May 6, 2009There are two posts on ScienceBlogs which highlight two perspectives on the Dinosaur mass extinction, What Wiped Out The Dinosaurs? and K-T extinction debates: cranky "skeptics" or reasonable science?. I'd assumed that the Asteroids-from-the-sky was the clear consensus, but please see this old BloggingHeads.TV clip where Peter Ward seems to imply that the waters are muddier than you'd think:
clock | May 6, 2009It is really sad when an independent book store closes. It is even sadder when that book store was not just a shop but also a center of local community, a place where people gathered to have coffee, talk, interact with boook authors, take art or yoga classes, participate in theater or children's activities. But the economic downturn is affecting everyone and Market Street Books in Southern Village was forced to close by May 1st.
I went there a couple of times last week, to commiserate with the employees and volunteers who were packing, wondering what the future will bring for them and picked…
bcohen | May 6, 2009Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 2 with Martha McCaughey, discussing her book The Caveman Mystique, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: How do you see the relationship between the academic fields of gender studies and science studies? And how has that relationship changed in the past two decades? I'm asking for a few reasons, but one of them is that I remember from graduate studies that many of the most persuasive accounts of the politics of science and technology came from feminist scholars.
MM: It's a big question, so I'll offer but a start…
evolvingthoughts | May 5, 2009Chris Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms has an absolutely stunning review of the origin of chloroplasts in eukaryotes. It's so good I thought it was from Elio Schaechter's blog Small Things Considered when it first popped up in my reader - higher praise there is not.