evolution
evolvingthoughts | June 16, 2008
Creationists and Darwinian skeptics often claim that natural selection could not produce the sort of improbability (often, for reasons that nobody is quite sure of, below 1 in 10 to the 500th power) that we see around us.
So it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that UK skeptic and magician Derren Brown (his homepage is here) has effectively explained it. Brown follows the fortunes, rather literally, of a woman who he tells 24 hours in advance the name of the winner of a horserace. After 3 successful predictions, he tells her to bet, and she wins several hundred pounds; Brown calls this…
edyong | June 16, 2008Jellyfish may seem like simple blobs of goo, but some are surprisingly sophisticated. The box jellyfish (Tripedelia cystophora), for example, is a fast and active hunter and stalks its prey with the aid of 24 fully functioning eyes. These are grouped into four clusters called rhopalia, which lie on each side of its cube-like body. Together, they give the box jellyfish a complete 360 degree view of its world and make it highly manoeuvrable.
Each eye cluster, four eyes are merely pits containing light-sensitive pigments, but two are remarkably advanced and carry their own lenses, retinas and…
evolvingthoughts | June 16, 2008
From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist.
ANDREW DENTON: Let's talk about the imagination of human beings. You're strongly on the record as being opposed to the concept of creationism. Why do you feel so strongly about it?
I feel so strongly about it because I think that it is in a quite simple historical factual way wrong. Um the arguments I would ah put forward ah now that we are um more knowledgeable about the world as a…
pharyngula | June 15, 2008Here's an interesting video overview of Jack Szostak's work. Set to the fourth movement of Beethoven's 9th? OK, if the science bores you, just listen to the music.
edyong | June 15, 2008Show someone a piece of rotting food and their reaction will be visibly similar the world over. Their eyes will close, their noses will wrinkle and their mouths will tighten, all part of a universal expression of disgust. Darwin himself was struck by the universal nature of human facial expressions - from the busiest of cities to the most isolated of villages, smiles and frowns are recognisable, done in the same way and carry the same meaning.
Facial expressions are massively important for the social lives of humans and it should come as no surprise that some parts of our brain are dedicated…
clock | June 14, 2008Anne-Marie found this article:
London's Natural History Museum is to decorate the ceiling of one of its major rooms with a permanent art installation, inspired by evolutionary theory, in honour of Charles Darwin's bicentennial. The 10 shortlisted entrants have now been announced and their ideas are on display.
You can see a slideshow of the proposals, but the article does not say exactly who is doing the choosing. Some internal committee, public at large?
Which proposal do you like the best? Perhaps we can influence the choosers if we write about this all over the blogs.
edyong | June 14, 2008
We've all found gems hidden among junk before - the great album you own but never listened to, the book on your shelf that you never read, or the boot sale item that's worth a fortune. Geneticists are no different. Two years ago, Katherine Pollard and Sofie Salama discovered that one of the most important genes in human evolution has been lying in plain sight, hidden within a pile of genetic clutter.
Humans and our closest cousins, chimpanzees, evolved from a common ancestor, and we famously share anywhere from 96-99% of our DNA. This similarity suggests an obvious question: what are…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, experimental evolution, adaptation, mutation, natural selection, Richard E. Lenski
The common gut bacteria, Escherichia coli, typically known as E. coli.
Image: Dennis Kunkel.
Evolution is a random process -- or is it? I ask this because we all can name examples of convergent evolution where very different organisms arrived at similar solutions to the challenges they are faced with. One such example is the striking morphological similarities between sharks (marine fishes) and dolphins (marine mammals). Thus, based on observations of convergent…
gregladen | June 13, 2008 A very Darwin-like god ponders what the nature of life will be like. From Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. The origin of life presents a number of fundamental difficulties to science. One of these is the seemingly irreducible complexity of life itself. For instance, DNA codes for the molecules that are essential to life. Some of these molecules, however, are the very enzymes that help DNA code for molecules. It is difficult to imagine DNA works without these enzymes, but the enzymes exist in a cell because, in part, of the activities of DNA. Even the basic process of moving…
laelaps | June 13, 2008[Note: I know I'm about a month late coming to this one, but it still provided for some good blog fodder. It seems that the initial response at Pharyngula ended up changing the summary I discuss [see comments section], and that's definitely a good thing. The show has also been pushed back to July, it seems. Rather than scrap the post due to relative irrelevancy, I'll leave it up as I think it still speaks to some continuing problems in science communication.]
About a month or so ago I was contacted by someone from the History Channel about where to find some good images of prehistoric life on…
gregladen | June 12, 2008Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is a children's book for kids in third to fifth grade or, in my opinion, a little younger. Certainly this is an excellent choice, because of the cool illustrations, of a book to read aloud to the pre-literate little ones.
Author Gregory Wenzel does a good job in few words explaining life in the Jurassic, how bones get to become fossils, and something about how they are found. Most of the riveting several hundred words in this 32 page book are about the real stars of the show, the dinosaurs themselves.
Not every single dinosaur in this book is truly giant,…
gregladen | June 12, 2008By a vote of 94-3, Louisiana's House of Representatives today passed an academic freedom bill that would protect teachers and school districts who wish to promote critical thinking and objective discussion about evolution and other scientific topics.
There was no vocal opposition, and the floor speech by Rep. Frank Hoffman made clear that the bill was about science, not religion.
"This bill promotes good science education by protecting the academic freedom of science teachers," said Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute. "Critics who claim…
gregladen | June 11, 2008This just in:
Perhaps he was inspired by the turnout for Young People Fucking, or maybe he misses all that media attention he got after taking credit for getting C-10 through the House with nary a peep over the controversial changes to the film tax rebate. Whatever the reason, Reverend Charles McVety is headed back to the capital to co-host a private screening of a very different kind of film: Expelled: The Movie, the controversial anti-Darwin documentary that purports to expose a sinister anti-creationism bias within the mainstream scientific community.
The details are HERE.
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2008
I can't say much about this without reading the paper in the company of Somebody Who Knows About Chemistry, but Jack Szostak's team at the Harvard Medical School has done some interesting looking work on the self assembly of lipids into miscelles that could contain DNA reactions. What is new to me is the claim that lipids might have been formed in hydrothermal vents rather than as by-products of the original chemical cycle. But it doesn't explain how the transition from "found" lipid monomers to "made" monomers arose. Anyway, check it out.
laelaps | June 11, 2008
When I wrote about the new sauropod Futalognkosaurus dukei last October, I noted that the authors of the paper describing the animal also included a brief summary of the other animals found nearby. Remains of crocodiles, fish, and pterosaurs provided some clues as to the paleoecology of the area about 90 million years ago, but one of the big surprises was a big honkin' claw from Megaraptor. At first the remains of Megaraptor were thought to represent a coelurosaur, but the complete hand has shown that it is probably either a spinosaurid or carcharodontosaurid. A recent study of the hand,…
mikethemadbiologist | June 11, 2008Here's a letter from the journal Nature from a Mexican author about creationism:
In Mexico, there is no creationist movement and the teaching of evolution is encouraged. The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México has developed high-school programmes based around sequence comparison and phylogenetic reconstruction techniques, as well as the origin of life, early cell evolution and evo-devo issues. There are good reasons for this. First, as every practising scientist knows, understanding evolutionary processes is enriched by an eclectic attitude towards traditional palaeontology and…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2008
This guy is brilliant, both as a guitarist and a lyricist.
Oh, his name's Chris Smither, if you want to Google him.
pharyngula | June 10, 2008
While I was traveling last week, an important paper came out on evolution in E. coli, describing the work of Blount, Borland, and Lenski on the appearance of novel traits in an experimental population of bacteria. I thought everyone would have covered this story by the time I got back, but there hasn't been a lot of information in the blogosphere yet. Some of the stories get the emphasis wrong, claiming that this is all about the rapid acquisition of complex traits, while the creationists are making a complete hash of the story. Carl Zimmer gets it right, of course, and he has the advantage…
jlynch | June 10, 2008Two quick shots ...
Firstly, ASU is planning to install a 2 megawatt roof-top solar grid that will provide over 20% of the power to our campus. The installation is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
That’s enough to run 4,600 computers and reduce carbon emissions by 2,825 tons per year, or the equivalent of taking 530 cars off the road for a year. Long-term plans call for up to 7 megawatts of solar-generating capacity to be built at ASU in Tempe, with additional solar installations at its campuses in downtown Phoenix and other locations.
Secondly, Lawrence Krauss (of The…
laelaps | June 9, 2008In a very interesting post about agamids and chameleons at Tetrapod Zoology, my fellow ScienceBlogger Darren states the following;
One of the greatest fallacies held about evolutionary theory is that fossils are essential in demonstrating the existence of change (don't believe me? Look at 'creation science' books like Duane Gish's Evolution: the Challenge of the Fossil Record and Evolution: the Fossils Say No!). Of course fossils do indeed show how characters were accrued and modified over time, and it's that 'time' aspect of the data that they shed crucial information on. But we most…