evolution
mikethemadbiologist | August 24, 2008By way of Michael Tomasky, I stumbled across this site hosted by presidential debate moderator Rev. Rick Warren (?!?). Here's what the good reverend has to say about evolution:
What about dinosaurs?
Question: How do they fit in with the idea that God created the world rather than the world evolving on it's own? Why doesn't the Bible talk about dinosaurs?
Answer: The Bible tells in Genesis 1 that God made the world in seven days, and that he made all of the animals on the fifth day and the sixth day. All of the animals were created at the same time, so they all walked the earth at the same…
pharyngula | August 23, 2008Tony Sidaway discusses a unifying property of theistic evolutionists: the desire or need for there to be some kind of universal plan for their existence. It's not an attitude I understand very well; I don't think it makes life better to believe that there is some ineffable teleological intent behind the events in your life, and no one ever bothers to explain why it would be preferable to be a pawn to a cosmic puppetmaster. Their reasoning also tends to be incredibly bad, as can be seen in the article by Mark Vernon that inspired Tony's musings.
The work of Conway Morris, and now many others,…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like at that scale, see this).
While I haven't yet read the book (I'll be reviewing it for Metascience), a couple of points that Fuller's post make clear:
1. He has a really casual dismissal of factual accuracy so long as the "spirit" is right
2. This explains why he's allied himself with ID.…
laelaps | August 21, 2008Here it is, at long last, my take on the first part of The Genius of Charles Darwin. I've included each of the parts available on YouTube and recorded the running time to which each of my comments applies. This may require some scrolling if you're playing the home game. Now that I think of it, it would have been fun to do a Rifftrax-style commentary on each episode, but I don't have the means or know-how to pull that off. I'll also cover parts 2 & 3 in the days to come, but (as I've heard) the very beginning is a very good place to start.
False facts are highly injurious to the progress…
zooillogix | August 21, 2008There's no interesting news. It appears all the world's animals have finally been discovered, their strange mating behaviors documented, and their interest in acting all crazy for YouTube evaporated. But we are undaunted. We will make the logical transition and become a knitting blog.
Once again, we bring you critters from Mochimochi Land complete with their creator's commentary. Past installments here and here.
Evolving Punk
Evolution is still a pretty radical idea - just ask this little Evolving Punk. He recently made the big step onto dry land from the primordial ooze of a dirty toilet.…
pharyngula | August 21, 2008Here follows a brief account of my sojourn in the Galápagos Islands, just to give you all a rough idea of what I was up to all this time. I've tossed in just a few pictures to illustrate what we experienced; I'm planning to dole out the rest a little bit at a time, each week. I took a lot of pictures, and I was a real piker compared to a few other people on the trip — I'm thinking that if I use mine and some of the other photographs people took, if I post one a week, I'll be able to keep the blog going for about 3800 years.
This cruise was organized by the James Randi Educational Foundation,…
laelaps | August 21, 2008I know I have been promising it for a while, but tonight I will finally be getting around to liveblogging my reactions to the recently-aired series The Genius of Charles Darwin, hosted by Richard Dawkins. The title of this post should already give you an impression of what I thought of the series, although I was tempted to come up with some sort of title involving "Richard Dawkins and Friends" given the presence of his adaptationist compadres Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett.
If you haven't seen the documentary already, most (if not all) of it is freely available on YouTube, and if you have…
evolvingthoughts | August 21, 2008
So says a committee of the UK House of Lords:
Systematic biology and taxonomy - the science of describing and identifying plants and animals - is in critical decline and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) must act before it is too late.
Of course, this is not the first time this has been said, and recommendations made before have not been acted upon:
"Systematic biology appears to be suffering the consequences of a situation where diffuse responsibility (among government departments) results in no responsibility," the report says.
Concerns about the state of…
pharyngula | August 19, 2008Hey, the next episode of the History Channel's series on evolution is coming up soon: Evolve: Sex. I don't quite have the stamina to liveblog it tonight — I'm ready to fall asleep sitting down — but I'll be tuned in and trying to watch it.
grrlscientist | August 19, 2008tags: cognition, behavior, self-recognition, self awareness, tool use, memory, brain architecture, birds, European magpie, Pica pica, researchblogging.org
Figure 1. European magpie, Pica pica, with yellow mark [larger view].
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202.
Birds have been disparaged publicly as "bird brains" for so long that most people have lost the ability to view them as intelligent and sentient beings. However, a group of researchers in Germany have conducted a series of studies with several captive European magpies, Pica pica, that challenge the average person's view of birds and…
pharyngula | August 17, 2008Since it has been a long time since I contributed any content to Pharyngula…here's something. I was asked to give a brief talk on the ship, so I've tossed my written draft below the fold. With these short talks I like to write the story first, but when I get up on the stage and actually perform it, I don't bring notes or anything like that, so what is actually said follows the structure of what I wrote, and some of the wording comes through, but it tends to be rather different. Probably a lot different —I know I extemporized a fair bit on the last half. This is all you get until I've had a…
grrlscientist | August 17, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase. This edition is absolutely packed with book titles that you will want to read!
FEATURED TITLE:
James, Jamie. The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge. 2008. Hyperion. Hardbound: 260 pages. Price…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2008Olivia Judson, in an excellent op-ed, lays out the utility argument for why students should learn evolution as part of biology:
The second reason for teaching evolution is that the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve -- and fast. And I'm not talking just about the obvious examples: widespread resistance to pesticides among insects; the evolution of drug resistance in the agents of disease, from malaria to tuberculosis; the possibility that, say, the virus that causes bird flu will evolve into a form that…
laelaps | August 16, 2008I'm hard at work on my book today (I intend to finish the chapter on whales by the end of the weekend) but I won't leave you hanging. Here's a Charlie Rose episode from 1994 featuring both Stephen Jay Gould (starting at the 29:10 mark) and Donald Johanson (starting at 45:25, with a rather unfortunate introductory blurb);
edyong | August 15, 2008Hey folks, I've got a feature article in this week's New Scientist, which is my second for the magazine. The article describes the story of FOXP2, the "language gene" that's not really a language gene.
The story started a few years ago, when a group of scientists led by Simon Fisher found that a single genetic mutation was responsible for an inherited language disorder in a British family called KE. The gene in question - FOXP2 - was quickly touted as a "gene for language" by an overenthusiastic and sensationalist media.
Since then, researchers have probed the true nature of FOXP2 using…
clock | August 14, 2008A very nice column by Olivia Judson:
The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, "The Republican War on Science," the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence -- or indeed, evidence of any kind -- has permeated the Bush administration's policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.
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But for me, the most important thing about studying…
clock | August 14, 2008One of the cool perks of being a scienceblogger and going to a meetup this year was the opportunity to go and see the Horse Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and to recieve (as we were not allowed to take pictures in there) a CD with some of the pictures. You can also see a lot more text and pictures, pretty closely following what is on the exhibit itself, on the excellent Horse Exhibit wesbite.
So, on Saturday afternoon, after the Meet-the-Readers event, several of us got on the subway and went up to the Museum. And I was not disappointed. You know I love…
clock | August 14, 2008I've been saving this picture for more than a year, not showing it to anyone or posting it anywhere online, not wanting to break the embargo:
This was a picture I took of one of the fossils brought to SciFoo'07 by Paul Sereno and Gabrielle Lyon, together with the skull of Nigersaurus.
Apparently, while digging for dinosaurs in Niger, Paul and the crew discovered an enormous and fascinating archaeological site - Gobero. They teamed up with anthropologists and archaeologists and spent two digging seasons analysing the site. The first results of this study are now finally published in my…
sheril | August 14, 2008Scientists from the Netherlands have created a genetic map of Europe showing the degree of relatedness between populations in which nearly 2,500 subjects were analyzed by correlating their genetic variations.
Such tools help to provide insight into human migrations, survival advantages, and genetic barriers.... but my favorite part is the way they show people are so similar. On a pale blue dot fraught with conflict, it's a reminder we're not all that different in the big picture. More at The New York Times.
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2008
It's always a Bad Idea to critique a paper on the basis of summaries, but I just can't seem to make Proceedings of the Royal Society let me download this article. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have proposed another explanation for religion, based on the correlation between tropics and diseases, and the variety of religions in the tropics.
Their argument, it appears, is to note that controlling for other factors you get higher numbers of religions in more tropical regions. Promoting within-group solidarity therefore is a way to prevent the spread of diseases, to prevent contagion. As…