Life Sciences
stcynic | February 15, 2005Scott Foust, a german literature student at the University of Cincinatti, is the winner of February's Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly known as the Idiot of the Month award) for this breathtakingly ignorant article in the newspaper of that university. In it, Foust takes the commonly heard, and utterly false, claim that evolution supports racism and adds to it a whole new set of lies and falsehoods. His particular specialty is the unsupported assertion. Right off the bat, he trots out this one:
If evolution is to be believed, black history would include the notion that blacks are still an…
loom | February 7, 2005Growing up as I did in the northeast, I always assumed that the really weird life forms lived somewhere else--the Amazonian rain forest, maybe, or the deep sea. But we've got at least one truly bizarre creature we can boast about: the star-nosed mole. Its star is actually 22 fleshy tendrils that extend from its snout. For a long time, it wasn't entirely clear what the moles used the star for. The moles were so quick at finding food--larvae, worms, and other creatures that turn up in their tunnels--that some scientists suggested that the star could detect the electric fields of animals.
That…
loom | January 28, 2005Thanks to the many people who left comments on my recent post about some recent work on the intersection of stem cells and human evolution. I noticed that several people expressed variations on the same theme, one which deserves a response. To recap briefly: a great deal of research indicates that a couple million years ago, our hominid ancestors lost the ability to make one of the main sugars that coat mammal cells, called Neu5Gc. This ancient chapter in our history turns out to have a big effect on current research on embryonic stem cells. When human stem cells are raised on a substrate…
loom | January 23, 2005Last October, word leaked out that something might be seriously amiss with the embryonic stem cell lines approved by President Bush for federally funded research. Today, the full details were published on line in Nature Medicine. It's an important paper, and not only because it points out a grave problem with the current state of stem cell research. It also shows how scientists who do cutting-edge medical research are looking back at two million years of human evolution to make sense of their work. At a time when antievolutionists are trying hard to wedge creationist nonsense into science…
tfk | January 16, 2005Reposted from the old TfK.
I suggested at the bottom of a longish post that the Endangered Species Act ought to be supplemented with an Endangered Ecosystem Act.
The reason begins with thinking like a mountain. If you've read the last post and my Thinking Like a Savannah and you haven't read Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, or at least its essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” just do it, and come right back.
…
OK, so now you understand what ecologists have known for 50 years – that the important thing in conservation is not the individual animal or even, perhaps, the individual species. Some…
tfk | January 10, 2005Reposted from the old TfK.
In the last weeks, there have been a bunch of stories about endangered species recovery and possible changes to the Endangered Species Act. I blogged on some of the issues raised before (and before that). The fundamental problem in many cases is that the ESA is not perfect.
Western governors seem to have their own ideas:
The most controversial proposal is change the law so it requires the use of "best science" rather than "best available science" to determine if a species is endangered. If the current research weren't conclusive, then more studies would have to be…
stcynic | January 2, 2005Carl Zimmer has another stellar post on his blog, this one about the evolution of the immune system. It's a review of this article (PDF format) by Klein and Nikolaidis, entitled The descent of the antibody-based immune system by gradual evolution. This article points up a very important point that I was making in an exchange in the comments a few weeks ago, about nested heirarchies as a powerful line of evidence for evolution. All animals, living or dead, can be placed into groups based upon shared derived characteristics and those groups form tree-like heirarchies. Branch B splits off from…
loom | December 31, 2004Evolutionary biologists face a challenge that's a lot like a challenge of studying ancient human history: to retrieve vanished connections. The people who live in remote Polynesia presumably didn't sprout from the island soil like trees--they must have come from somewhere. Tracing their connection to ancestors elsewhere hasn't been easy, in part because the islands are surrounded by hundreds of miles of open ocean. It hasn't been impossible though: studies on their culture, language, and DNA all suggest that the Polynesians originally embarked from southeast Asia. We may never be able to…
loom | December 27, 2004Size matters. At least that's the result of some recent research on long-term evolutionary trends that I'll be reporting in tomorrow's New York Times. Here are the first few paragraphs...
Bigger is better, the saying goes, and in the case of evolution, the saying is apparently right.
The notion that natural selection can create long-term trends toward large size first emerged about a century ago, but it fell out of favor in recent decades. Now researchers have taken a fresh look at the question with new methods, and some argue that these trends are real.
Biologists have recently found that in…
stcynic | December 2, 2004I've got an anonymous creationist (AC) who keeps piling one absurd statement on to another in the comments on a post below. I'm going to move the discussion up here to keep it from getting lost. This post is addressed directly to him.The problem at this point is that you think you're not being taken seriously because you're a "skeptic" of evolution. The truth, however, is that you're not being taken seriously because your arguments are really, really bad. Let me give just a few examples of the statements you have made that are either incoherent, false or meaningless:
Examples of adaptation…
loom | October 16, 2004Here's the most important thing about The Ancestor's Tale that I couldn't fit in my review. I kept noticing how little Richard Dawkins mentioned the other celebrity evolutionary biologist of our time, Stephen Jay Gould. After all, Gould was a prominent character in many of Dawkins's previous books, cast as the brilliant paleontologist misled by leftist ideology.
Gould was famous for his attacks on adaptationism--the notion that the creative powers of natural selection are behind all sorts of fine points of nature, from jealousy to 11-year cicada cycles. Dawkins was an ultra-Darwinian…
stcynic | August 6, 2004I'm moving this exchange up to its own posting because I don't want it to get lost amid the more recent articles. We first encountered Jen Shroder when her colleague Tamara Wilhite was awarded the Idiot of the Week prize a few weeks ago. I found an incredibly stupid article by Wilhite on a site called bushcountry.org that actually said that the terrorists will bomb us because of gay marriage, then while looking through that site came across an even more ridiculous article by Shroder, that included such staggering statements as:"Pluralism" is a hate religion dedicated to eradicating the…
stcynic | July 8, 2004In the comments on a post made some weeks ago, an exchange has begun between myself and William Gibbons, a creationist, concerning the evidence for evolution. There are several issues there that really can't be settled for quite some time, but I want to move the main part of the dispute, the evidence for evolution, up here into its own post so it won't get lost in the shuffle. Examining issues like this and the creationist claims concerning them is important, I think. He asked me to provide the 10 best evidences for evolution and I said let's just start with one and referred to a statement I…
loom | July 7, 2004Could test tube babies be revealing some of the hidden workings of evolution? It's a definite possibility, judging from some recent reports about the balance of males and females.
For several decades, evolutionary biologists have been trying to figure out the forces that set this balance. It appears that they come down to a tug of war between competing interests. Imagine a species in which a freakish mutation makes the females gives birth to lots and lots of daughters. If you're a male, suddenly your chances of reproducing look very good--certainly better than all those females. Now imagine…
loom | July 2, 2004In 1970, the natural history illustrator Rudolph Zallinger painted a picture of human evolution called "The March of Progress" in which a parade of hominids walked along from left to right, evolving from knuckle-walking ape to tall, spear-carrying Cro-Magnon. The picture is etched in our collective consciousness, making it possible for cartoonists to draw pictures like the one here safe in the knowledge that we'll all get the joke. I had actually wanted to show Zallinger's own picture, but, like others before me, I failed to find it on the web. I was inspired to hunt down the picture by the…
loom | June 21, 2004We like to think of boundaries as being clear-cut borders, but at least in the biological world they generally turn out to be fuzzy zones of change. The line between land and sea is my own favorite example. Last summer my wife and I would sometimes take our oldest daughter Charlotte to the beach. At the time she was a year old and refused to put her toe in the water. This summer she heads straight in, but only about up to her knees. She runs back out and goes back in, repeating the circuit a few dozen times. Next year, I still expect to see her chin above the water line. In her own tadpoling…
loom | June 15, 2004In the New York Times this morning, the poet Diane Ackerman has written an essay about the brain, in which she waxes eloquent about its ability to discern patterns in the world. The essay is distilled from her new book, An Alchemy of the Mind, which I've just reviewed for the Washington Post. I didn't much like the book, although it took me a while to figure out what was bothering me about it. If you read the essay, you can get the flavor of the book, not to mention Ackerman's general style in her previous books (which have taken on subjects such as endangered species and the senses).…
loom | June 3, 2004One of the most exciting lines of research in evolution today is how parasites have become so good at making us sick. A case in point appears in the latest issue of Genome Biology (full text of paper here). It appears that parasites have stolen one of our best lines of defense and now use it against us.
When bacteria or other pathogens try to invade our bodies, we marshall an awesome system of biochemistry to ward them off. Recently, a group of French and German molecular biologists took a look at a key piece of that system, a molecule studding the surface of our cells called alpha-2-…
stcynic | April 29, 2004Anyone who has followed the evolution/creationism issue for any period of time is quite accustomed to seeing articles filled with the most basic factual errors, poor spelling and hackneyed arguments. But this article, written by someone named Brian Cherry in a webmag called the Washington Dispatch, may take the cake. It's bad enough that for a moment, one suspects that it is a parody. Alas, it's not. Mr. Cherry actually wrote it and, presumably, believes it. Unfortunately, he can't even get the most basic facts right, let alone comprehend the larger issues he discusses. Let's begin the…
loom | April 21, 2004John Maynard Smith has died.
While many people know who Stephen Jay Gould was or Richard Dawkins is, Id bet few would be able to identify Maynard Smith. Thats a shame, because he played a key role in building the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. (Underlining this point, I only learned about his death from Science's online new service. As far as I can tell, no one else has run an obituary.)
Maynard Smith came to evolution from a previous career as an engineer. In World War II he measured the stress on airplane wings. When he moved to evolution, he brought with him a gift to see the…