evolution
pharyngula | January 31, 2009A few people (actually, a lot of people) have written to me asking me to address Kirk Durston's probability argument that supposedly makes evolution impossible. I'd love to. I actually prepared extensively to deal with it, since it's the argument he almost always trots out to debate for intelligent design, but — and this is a key point — Durston didn't discuss this stuff at all! He brought out a few of the slides very late in the debate when there was no time for me to refute them, but otherwise, he was relying entirely on vague arguments about a first cause, accusations of corruption against…
clock | January 31, 2009Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction by Eugenie C. Scott.
Written at this time.
jwhitfield | January 31, 2009Thomas Kuhn -- the one philosopher of science that even ignorami like me have heard of -- said that during periods of 'normal science', researchers only take on problems that they know they can solve. 'Paradigm' is an overused word, but it's a measure of the paradigm-shifting nature of the Origin that in much of it, such as in chapter 9 'On the imperfection of the geological record', Darwin flies blind.
This creates almost as much trouble for the reader as it does for Darwin, as we saw in the previous chapter. The less you can explain, the more you need to describe; where Darwin has cracked a…
razib | January 30, 2009The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, is now available from Amazon & fine local bookstores. Over at 2 Blowhards one of the authors Greg Cochran has done a 5-part interview: part 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Set some time aside, there's a lot there....
pharyngula | January 30, 2009Ahh, listen to the sense as well as the pleasant accent…
(via 100 Days of Science)
razib | January 30, 2009My friend Aziz Poonawalla has a post up, is evolution sufficient? No, it's not the standard Creationist cant:
The implication of such rapid evolution is that we should actually notice it on human timescales. And that there is actually is some mechanism of action that is actually driving the mutations themselves - cosmic rays? transcription errors? normal statistical variance?
It seems that if we aren't mutating at a rate comparable to above, then some sort of alternative mechanism must also be operating to accelerate the changes in DNA required to evolve from one species to another. There's…
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Just recently, in an essay in Philosophy of Science (whose bastard editors will not even acknowledge that they have received my submissions after 12 months, ahem), Michael Devitt published a paper in which he wants to establish what he calls "intrinsic biological essentialism".
I will have…
clock | January 30, 2009From NESCENT:
Carl Zimmer
"Darwin and Beyond: How Evolution Is Evolving"
February 12, 2009
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Talk Overview: Charles Darwin launched the modern science of evolution, but he hardly had the last word. In fact, today scientists are discovering that evolution works in ways Darwin himself could not have imagined. In my talk I will celebrate Darwin's achievements by looking at the newest discoveries about evolution, from the emergence of life to the dawn of humanity.
Please join us for a Darwin Day presentation by Carl Zimmer. Mr. Zimmer is well known for his popular science writing…
cmooney | January 29, 2009My latest Science Progress column is up: It makes the case that Stephen Colbert is the heir to Johnny Carson in terms of talk show promotion of science.
It also includes various lame and stupid talking points that I made up and didn't use on the show, such as the following hypothetical Q&A responses:
Didn't scientists start the "war" in the first place? Didn't they commit acts of aggression?
Yes, if you mean by learning things.
Why should I care about science?
Because America is really good at it--much better than France.
Is there really a "war" on science? Where are the bodies?
Well,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2009One of the rhetorical strategies that has been employed against science deniers has been the claim that a 'broad scientific consensus exists' to support a certain position (e.g., global warming, evolution). A problem with this strategy is shown by the blog belonging to this commenter (I don't give links to wackaloons) which provides lists of scientists that don't think global warming is partly due to human influences.
This misses the entire meaning of scientific consensus: it's a process, not a list of names.
This is not how a scientific consensus is reached:
"Dude, the earth is kinda hot…
cmooney | January 29, 2009
So...I have a new home.
Just two days ago now, I arrived in Princeton, New Jersey and occupied a new apartment here, along with the fiance and the puppy. Los Angeles was a blast, and it's somewhere I think everyone ought to try to live--but I wanted to get back to the hoary old east coast.
I also had reason to do so: I'm now a visiting associate at the Center for Collaborative History here. The professor I'll be collaborating with is D. Graham Burnett, a science historian who taught me Darwin at Yale back in 1997. We're working on a history of science project, not surprisingly...and that's…
jwhitfield | January 29, 2009George Bernard Shaw, according to a comment left on a previous post, thought that many people gave up on reading the Origin because, convinced of Darwin's argument, they wearied of him making his points over and over again.
But I disagree. It's not seeing Darwin restate his case that's tiring. It's seeing him return, like a dog to its vomit, to questions that he admitted in chapters one and two couldn't be answered.
When I read these earlier chapters, I was struck by how skilfully Darwin skirted uncertainties, and even how he used them in his arguments. I thought of giving this a fancy name…
jlynch | January 28, 2009Nick Matzke over at PT has just made me aware that Mike Majerus had passed away after a sudden illness. Those of us who have followed the ID issue will know Majerus from the studies he did of melanism in peppered moths Biston betularia and the empirical work he did to refute the nonsense spouted by the likes on Jonathan Wells and Judith Hooper on Kettlewell’s work on the moths.
His last paper, “Industrial Melanism in the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia: An Excellent Teaching Example of Darwinian Evolution in Action” appeared last month in Evolution: Education and Outreach you could do worse…
jlynch | January 28, 2009I’m quoted in a press release regarding a teacher training workshop (the “Evolution Challenges Workshop”) we’re giving at ASU to help middle and high school teachers teach evolution. Money quotes:
Studies have shown that “16 percent of high school biology teachers are essentially young earth creationists who deny human evolution, with only 28 percent accepting unguided naturalistic evolution of humans,” says John Lynch, a lecturer in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and an Honors Faculty Fellow in Barrett, the Honors College. “While this latter number is higher than the general public’s 13…
jrosenhouse | January 28, 2009If you saw my post the other day about Jerry Coyne's review of the recent books by Ken Miller and Karl Giberson, then you might also be interested to know that Miller and Giberson have now replied. Click here for Miller's reply, and click here for Giberson's.
Let's look at Giberson, first:
Empirical science does indeed trump revealed truth about the world as Galileo and Darwin showed only too clearly. But empirical science also trumps other empirical science. Einstein's dethronement of Newton was not the wholesale undermining of the scientific enterprise, even though it showed that science…
sa smith | January 28, 2009Okay so there was some drama last week when tickets to see Dawkins at OU sold out in... less than 15 minutes.
Good news!
Though Dawkins vetoed moving the presentation to the largest venue on campus (lol picturing Dawkins rocking out in an arena like Metallica), there will be A/V feeds of the presentation to other rooms, and it will be recorded!
Also, lol that a lot of fundies are pissed they didnt get tickets. HEH!
cmooney | January 28, 2009Here it is:
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The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Obama's New Science Policy - Chris Mooney
Colbert Report Full EpisodesColbert Report Tickets
Paul McCartney AppearanceMore Funny Videos
I'll have more to say about the whole experience in my next column....thanks to everyone who wrote in with positive words about the segment.
mikethemadbiologist | January 27, 2009If you're an evolutionary biologist, try to find the time to do this:
The National Center for Science Education has joined with the Coalition
on Public Understanding of Science to help put together content for
their Year of Science website http://www.yearofscience2009.org/home/.
One part of the website for February (which focuses on Evolution) will
highlight scientists and their research, and specifically why evolution
is important to their work.
We are asking for interested researchers to submit the information below.
We will then incorporate their information into the website.
Responses can…