evolution
pharyngula | February 12, 2009Gary Marcus, author of Kluge(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (a book I recommend), has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that makes an important point: evolution does not produce rational, perfect, finely-tuned beings. It makes organisms that are good enough. Keep this in mind when looking at anything biological (like, say, an appendix), and it's also true in economics, as Marcus points out — assuming that human beings will tend to make rational choices will lead to being fooled much of the time.
grrlscientist | February 12, 2009tags: blogosphere, meme, science books meme
Here is a meme that I was tagged with recently by the good peeps at Science on Tap. The author writes;
Imagine: YOU are asked to assign a half-dozen-or-so books as required reading for ALL science majors at a college as part of their 4-year degree; NOT technical or text books, but other works, old or new, touching upon the nature of science, philosophy, thought, or methodology in a way that a practicing scientist might gain from.
Post your list, and forward the meme to a half-dozen-or-so other science-oriented bloggers of your choosing.
As you…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009I don't have much to say about the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. I have always accepted the notion of evolution as a precondition to all other understanding in biology. Without evolution, all the patterns and apparent unity in life is rendered into incomprehensible gibberish.
Darwin did much to facilitate our understanding of evolution, but he did not do it alone and much has happened since his death.
All that I would recommend on this anniversary is that you read (or reread) evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky's 1973 essay "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009To celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Darwin's birth, the NYTimes has a video of singing Darwin scholar, Richard Milner. Check it out.
evolvingthoughts | February 12, 2009So today, which is in the antipodes (we being so far ahead of you northern western types) the 200th birthday of an obscure British naturalist gentleman, we address this myth:
Myth 2: Darwin did not explain the origin of species in The Origin of Species
Here's some folk claiming just that:
One of the ironies of the history of biology is that Darwin did not really explain the origin of new species in The Origin of Species, because he didn’t know how to define a species. [Futuyma 1983: 152]
… The Origin of Species, whose title and first paragraph imply that Darwin will have much to say about…
gregladen | February 12, 2009In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of biogeography and evolution.
reposted
In the vicinity of Rio Tercero...
Hearing ... of the remains of one of the old giants, which a man told me he had seen on the banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the…
evolvingthoughts | February 12, 2009This doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but it turns out that a number of widely quoted sayings of Darwin are, in fact, invented. I would not be surprised to find out they are taken from reviews and other authors' summaries of Darwin.
pharyngula | February 12, 2009Seed has compiled a short list celebratory articles and media for your Darwin Day — take a look. I rather liked The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds: it's very short, but it puts everything in perspective by listing key events in the 4.6 billion year history of the planet with appropriate timing to fit into one minute. If they'd put it into the context of the over 13 billion year history of the universe, it might have been even more dramatic.
Produced by Claire L. Evans.
laelaps | February 12, 2009Two hundred years ago today, in the little country town of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Charles Robert Darwin was born. No one then could have known that, fifty years and nine months later, Charles would deliver a treatise that would forever change our understanding of our place in nature. That is precisely what he did, though, and today many are honoring the evolutionary synthesis Darwin presented in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (to say nothing of his other works).
Indeed, today we are not so much celebrating Darwin's birth (if this were his primary achievement we…
evolvingthoughts | February 12, 2009In the Descent of Man, Darwin cites a paper published about 5 years earlier by W. R. Greg, which argues that natural selection is not active among humans (or, as the convention had it then, "Man"). It is most interesting that he does, because Greg is the intellectual father of all those who think that civilisation, and in particular medicine and poverty relief, leads to a degradation of health and virtue. In short, Greg is the father of social "Darwinism". What is Darwin's response? First he spends a dozen or so pages showing that in fact civilised human beings are still subjected to (…
sa smith | February 12, 2009HAPPY MONKEY!
Few random quickies for today--
1. I think a YEC challenged me to a dual. Or something. A friend was having a 'debate' with some random radical Christian pastor/reverend/whatever via letters to the editor in the Yukon Review, and cited some things he had learned from me and ERV. Random weirdo bawwwed to his 'professional' YEC butt-buddy. YEC butt-buddy took radical weirdos place in the 'debate', and now for some reason Im debating this guy:
*gasp!* Uh, oh... hes a lifetime member of American MENSA, people. I think Im in over my head here. lol.
2. SEED has up a ton of…
cmooney | February 12, 2009Over at Science Progress, I've been involved in putting together not one but two items timed for Darwin Day.
The first is an op-ed coauthored with my prof here at Princeton, D. Graham Burnett, who teaches Darwin. We argue for historical nuance, which leads one to reject the idea that Darwin should be considered an icon of conflict between science and religion. In fact, we call that idea "a hackneyed story, lacking in historical nuance and ultimately running counter to the project of drawing helpful lessons from the life of one of history's greatest scientists." A brief excerpt:
...Science-…
awild | February 12, 2009In honor of the old man's 200th, Myrmecos Blog is proud to feature Charles Darwin writing prophetically about the problems posed by social insects for his theory of natural selection.  The passage below is from the first edition of On the Origin of Species, and in it Darwin anticipates the same answers- kin and group selection- that later generations of biologists converged on to solve the riddle. Not bad for a barnacle taxonomist...
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could…
gregladen | February 12, 2009And hominids.
We know the fossil record underestimates diversity at least a little, and we know that forested environments in Africa tend to be underrepresented. Given this, the diversity of Miocene apes may have been rather impressive, because there is a fairly high diversity in what we can assume is a biased record.
But I'd like to make the argument from another angle, that of modern ecological analogues. Let us assume that the greater apparent diversity of apes in the middle and late Miocene compared today can be accurately translated as a modern reduction in ape diversity. Not…
jwhitfield | February 12, 2009After careful reflection, I'd say it is worth reading The Origin of Species. Biology doesn't erase it's past, as I thought. It just forgets to cite it.
The Origin is biology's hub -- all the routes that the science has taken since seem to pass through it. This, I think, is partly because Darwin had such a complete vision of the living world, and partly because his ignorance of some areas was so great that he had to hedge his bets, and mention everything in just in case.
The book is so rich that I could have written about entirely different subjects in each post.
To give just one example, in…
pharyngula | February 12, 2009
Get out and celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the most important scientists of all time, Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important books in biology, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It's that day!
I'm in Minnesota, and you have a couple of options here. The Bell Museum in Minneapolis is having a party!
Darwin Day Party
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 7 to 9 p.m.
Bell Museum Auditorium
$10/ free to museum members and University students
The…
hrynyshyn | February 12, 2009I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by the amount of attention Charles Darwin is drawing on this, the 200th anniversary of his birth. And although anything I contribute is almost certain to be redundant, I feel obliged to chime in. So:
Yes, Darwin was brilliant. One of the top scientific minds of all time. A man with few peers. Someone everyone agrees belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Science along with Newton, Einstein and some fourth character (about whom there can be no agreement).
Was he a saint? No. But then, no one is a saint. Has popular culture unecessarily conflated…
evolvingthoughts | February 11, 2009Oh, I forgot, due to the lack of internets at home, to link to my essay that I mentioned before:
Not Saint Darwin, in Resonance [PDF]
Consider this my "death of Darwin" piece.
edyong | February 11, 2009This is the sixth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial.
Physically, we are incredibly different from our ape cousins but genetically, it's a different story. We famously share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Our proteins are virtually identical and our chromosomes have more or less the same structure. At the level of the nucleotide (the "letters" that build strands of DNA), little has happened during ape evolution. These letters have been changing at a considerably slower rate than in our relatives than in other…