evolution
oracknows | June 26, 2008
Sigh.
He's baaack. Yes, that dualism-loving Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, that "intelligent design" apologist neurosurgeon whose nonsense has driven me time and time again to contemplate hiding my head in a paper bag or even a Doctor Doom mask because of the shame of knowing that he is also a surgeon, that physician who denies that an understanding of evolution is important to medicine and who just doesn't know when to quit, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back to embarrass me yet again. It's been a long time--months, actually--and, quite frankly I found the break from his specious…
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2008
The French have always had an affinity for developmental models of historical processes. Comte famously argued that societies had four stages to go through. Lamarck held that species were like individual organisms that had a youth, maturity and senescence. And more recently Teilhard held that evolution was heading towards a single goal. It's the philosophy of the Great Chain made temporal...
But maybe there are more general properties of historical processes that might be empirically determined to be either evolutionary (contingent) or developmental (systematically predictable)? After all…
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2008Theistic evolutionists have a bumper crop of books to choose from this summer. I've already reviewed Ken Miller's new book Only a Theory. Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution! is on deck in my “To Read” pile. The subject for today, however, is Karl Giberson's Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution. Giberson is a professor of physics at Eastern Nazarene College.
The curious thing about the book is that Giberson actually says very little about how to be both a Christian and an evolutionist. Most of the book is given over to covering the standard topics in this area…
pharyngula | June 25, 2008Let's play the most boring card game in the universe!
Here are the rules. We start with a fully sorted deck of 52 cards, and we deal out four hands. We don't deal in the ordinary way, either: we give the top 13 cards to the first player, then the next 13 to the second, and so forth. (We could also do the usual deal, but it makes the illustration and logic a little more difficult to see. We'll keep it simple for now.)
This is what the table will look like.
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oracknows | June 25, 2008...from one of Michigan State University Professor Richard Lenski's E. coli cultures.
Lenski's second response to the clueless "request" of the creationist idiot Andrew Schlafly to provide his raw data to him for "independent review" supporting a recent PNAS paper (more here) by him that is yet another in a line of papers by evolutionary biologists that pretty much destroy the myth of "irreproducible complexity" deeply humbles me. It's a classic in sliding the knife into one's foe, carefully dissecting free an organ, pulling that organ out with a flourish, only to plunge to plunge the knife…
pharyngula | June 24, 2008Once again, Richard Lenski has replied to the goons and fools at Conservapædia, and boy, does he ever outclass them. For a quick outline of the saga, read this summary at A Candid World; basically, Andy Schlafly has been demanding every bit of data from Richard Lenski's work on the evolution of E. coli, despite the fact that Schlafly doesn't have the background to understand it and doesn't have any plan for what he would do with it if he got it. Lenski has been polite and helpful in his replies; his first response is a model for how to explain difficult science to a bullying ideologue. Now…
laelaps | June 24, 2008In an essay called "The Reception of the 'Origin of Species'" printed in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (and reprinted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley), "Darwin's Bulldog" T.H. Huxley described the intellectual shock of understanding Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection;
As I have already said, I imagine that most of those of my contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter, were very much in my own state of mind -- inclined to say to both Mosaists and Evolutionists, "a plague on both your houses!" and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and…
razib | June 23, 2008Britain's Last Neanderthals Were More Sophisticated Than We Thought. I don't need to comment/summarize because Anthropology.net already has....
pharyngula | June 23, 2008That smart guy, Carl Zimmer, has written an article on those smart molluscs, the octopus. I like that his conclusion is that we can't really judge their intelligence, because it is different than our own.
That's the same answer I give to questions about the existence of intelligent life in the universe. I suspect that it's there (but rarer than most astronomers seem to think — intelligence is an extremely uncommon adaptive strategy here on Earth, as is probably likewise elsewhere), but that it will be radically different in intent and action than our own, as different as we are from a squid,…
gregladen | June 22, 2008Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference ... many things have been going on and I have more to report than time to report it. But I will get to all of it, I assure you. Tonight, I just want to cover part of today's Education Symposium (moderated by your's truly) ... not all of it at once, thought, as it is kind of complex.
If you happen to work for the University of Minnesota or know anyone who does, best to not read this or let anyone know about it. This is a little to heavy to be spoken of openly. (Since there are only 11 of you who read my blog, I think we'll…
sa smith | June 22, 2008WHOO!! The current list of speakers and activities scheduled for OUs celebration of Darwins 200th birthday is up! Sweet! Check back every now and then, because more activities are going to be added as speakers are confirmed (there are rumors a certain someone has agreed to visit us here in Salusa Secundus!).
If you cant make it to OU because youre stuck in the panhandle or locked in your church basement, its okay! It looks like they are going to try to make event podcasts available (and Im sure they could convince someone into video recording them for the www too).
Next year is gonna be…
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2008
A conference is being held in Sydney soon about whether God is necessary for morality. I find that an almost incomprehensible question. Of course humans are moral without gods to back up their moral systems. They can't help it. It's what humans do. We are social apes that follow rules. Sometimes the sanctions for following rules (which turn out to be sanctions for potential defectors rather than the majority, who will tend to follow rules with or without promises of reward or punishment) rely on a god. Mostly, they don't. The famous Euthyphro Dilemma (whether something is good because God…
mikethemadbiologist | June 21, 2008
Gimme back my PAUP* menus!
One of the most unheralded breakthroughs in DNA sequence analysis--and, in particular, phylogenetics--was PAUP*. PAUP* is software that uses morphology or DNA sequence to construct phylogenies; that is, how organisms are related to another**.
Originally, PAUP* was only Mac compatible. The 4.0 version had all sorts of nice pull down menus and little buttons to click. Not only did this make it an exceptional teaching tool, but it was also easy to use. The Intel-Mac, PC, and Unix versions operate through a command line (and the documentation for the command line…
laelaps | June 20, 2008
As I was skimming through Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), a book that injects a fair amount of Lamarckian evolution into a children's moral fable (the character Mother Carey "make[s] creatures make themselves."), I came across a section that made me grin.
During the course of the story the protagonist Tom is told that he needs to go see the Gairfowl, an old Great auk bird of high breeding (the Great auk just having become extinct in 1852. Thanks to Allen for the correction about the meaning of "Gairfowl."). I do not know what Kingsley thought of the evolution of birds (T.H.…
mikethemadbiologist | June 20, 2008So I emerge from my grant writing burrow only to discover by way of ScienceBlogling PZ that the clowns at Answers in Genesis are pestering National Academy of Sciences member Richard Lenski about the citrate evolution in E. coli paper he co-authored.
Fortunately, Gerlach at Off Resonance does a great job fisking this creationist crapdoodle, so I don't have to. While I'm glad Lenski responded, he should cut them off at this point. The problem is that his response, which is quite sensible--he presents the data that show that contamination is not an issue among other things--does not matter to…
grrlscientist | June 19, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, phylogeny, British birds, population decline, range contraction, Gavin H Thomas
An adult male Eurasian blackbird, Turdus merula.
Image: Wikipedia commons [larger view].
A paper recently published by British scientist, Gavin Thomas, a population biologist at Imperial College London, finds that British bird species that currently are suffering population declines tend to be close relatives of each other. The reason is obvious: closely related species tend to share many traits, such as very precise habitat requirements, and what's bad for one species is also bad…
laelaps | June 19, 2008Today I'm going to be working hard on my book, but I submit for your viewing pleasure the first episode of the PBS Evolution special (in twelve parts). Not everything is exactly right (so keep your thinking caps on), but I still think it's a good mix of the old & new (I especially was impressed by the section on the evolution of the eye).
evolvingthoughts | June 18, 2008
In an interesting post, Think Gene poses what they call "the inherent problem" of scientific theories:
The inherent problem of scientific theories is that there exists an infinite equally valid explanations. Why? Because unlike in mathematics, we never have perfect information in science. ...
OK, so our world understanding improves as we verify models, like if the Large Hadron Collider finds the Higgs… right? Theoretically, no. An infinite number of theories that are just as “probable” as the others still exist to be tested. All that was done was eliminate some of the theories. Subtracting…
evolvingthoughts | June 17, 2008
One of the most important documents published in zoology in the 19th century was in fact a rather mundane one: The Strickland Code:
Hugh. E. Strickland, John Phillips, John Richardson, Richard Owen, Leonard Jenyns, William J. Broderip, John S. Henslow, William E. Shuckard, George R. Waterhouse, William Yarrell, Charles R. Darwin, and John O. Westwood, "Report of a Committee Appointed "To Consider of the Rules by Which the Nomenclature of Zoology May Be Established on a Uniform and Permanent Basis"," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1842, 1843: 105-21.…
grrlscientist | June 17, 2008tags: evolution, beak and body size, Geospiza fortis, inbreeding, mating patterns, reproductive isolation, sexual imprinting
A family tree depicts the evolution of the 14 species of "Darwin's finches".
(The focus of this study, the Medium Ground Finch, Geospiza fortis, is denoted with a red dot).
[larger image].
I have always been fascinated by the process of speciation throughout my scientific career because speciation is the "engine" that generates biological diversity. But what are the evolutionary mechanisms that lead to speciation? We know that mate choice can be one important…