evolgen | August 23, 2006I gave Lawrence Krauss some shit regarding his double standard towards the tolerance of willful ignorance. He's cool with calling intelligent design proponents ignorant, but won't go all the way and say all religion is anti-knowledge. Judging by the letters in the NYTimes, there are some people who took umbrage at Krauss calling anyone ignorant:
To the Editor:
I disagree with Dr. Krauss's essay "How to Make Sure Children are Scientifically Illiterate." Darwinists are not advancing science by seeking federal court injunctions against criticism of Darwinism. Science is not a body of knowledge…
evolgen | August 23, 2006This week's Ask A ScienceBlogger is about the rainforest:
The destruction of the rainforest was a hot-button topic in the early '90s, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages. Are the rainforests still being destroyed wholesale? Are they all gone? Is it still important? Is the coffee I drink making it worse, and is "free trade" and/or "shade grown" coffee any better?
Yes, the rainforests are all gone. Every last one of them. Burnt to the ground by the military industrial complex. Because they hate hippies. Damn hippies. And atheists. And evolutionists Darwinists. And it's because of…
evolgen | August 22, 2006
Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a trend. The manatee in the Hudson River was an accident -- the Christopher Columbus of manatees if you will. The manatee in Rhode Island is a coincidence. I blame it on the grad student from our lab who moved to Florida to study manatees. She probably told them all about how great it is to live in the Northeast United States, so they came up here to check it out. Let's hope she didn't tell all of them about it; I don't want any trendy manatees hanging out in my neighborhood.
evolgen | August 22, 2006Mr. Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau, has joined the ScienceBlogs conglomerate operated by Seed Media Group. That gives us two blogs involved in thinking (Wilkins the philosopher has the other one), to go with our three evolution blogs (Evolution Blog, Evolving Thoughts, and evolgen). Josh is a graduate student, working on a PhD in Ecology and Evolution. By my count, we now how have six seven bloggers working on PhD's in the life sciences (Josh, Bora, Jake, Mike D, Shelley, Nick, and myself), along with two life sciences post docs (Alex and Evil Monkey), plus Wilkins who's a biologist by…
evolgen | August 21, 2006During the early part of the twentieth century, biological research was somewhat disjointed. Naturalists studied organisms and populations in the wild; geneticists were working out the mechanisms of heredity; and other researchers were figuring out how animals develop from a fertilized egg to an adult. One important union occurred when the naturalists and geneticists came together to study the genetics of natural populations. This led to the field of population genetics, which is still providing us with insights into the mechanisms of evolution today. Another major advance occurred when…
evolgen | August 21, 2006
I will be hosting the fifth edition of Mendel's Garden, the blog carnival devoted to genetics. If you would like to contribute something you have written, either email me (evolgen [at] yahoo [dot] com) or use the Blog Carnival submission page. You may submit entries relating to quantitative genetics, molecular genetics, evolutionary genetics, developmental genetics, or anything else genetical in nature. The deadline for submission is Friday, September 1.
evolgen | August 20, 2006Pharyngula tells us that Francis "Human Genome" Collins is scheduled to appear in a TV special entitled Darwin's Deadly Legacy. You may remember Frank from such stories as humans have stopped evolving. The extremist religious zealots behind the program claim that "Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project will show why evolution is a bad idea that should be discarded into the dustbin of history."
Let's assume that Frankie got duped into appearing in this special. Maybe the wack jobs evangelicals requested that he talk about his faith and his science. With the wonders of video…
evolgen | August 19, 2006Ask and ye shall receive. The fourth edition of Mendel's Garden has been posted at the Inoculated Mind. Take a journey through the organic garden.
evolgen | August 18, 2006Nature Reviews Genetics has published a terrible review of genetics blogging. And it's not just because they don't link to yours truly. The author links to Alex and Paul Zed, which means she knows about the ScienceBlogs empire network. I guess she didn't poke around long enough to find evolgen or Gene Expression. Maybe she saw them and wasn't sure if they were genetics blogs; it's not like the names give them away.
The article sucks for the most part because it's an exercise in shoddy research. The author attributes Mendel's Garden to Hsien-Hsien Lei. Hsien hosted the second edition, but the…
evolgen | August 18, 2006The Dinos hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial head with this proverbial strip:
evolgen | August 18, 2006I get a kick out of people who share the same name. Whether it be football players with the same name as musical legends or physicists and biologists causing confusion because of their names, I can't get enough. Thanks to Doc Hawks I can add another name to my list. It's population geneticist David Begun and anthropologist David Begun. This caused a bit of confusion on my part, as I was wondering why David Begun (the Drosophila population geneticists) had written a review of a book on primate evolution. Turns out it was the other David Begun (the anthropologist), with whom I was previously…
evolgen | August 18, 2006Janet tagged everyone with the Random Quotes meme.
The rules: "Go here and look through random quotes until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe."
I've added a comment for each of my selections, but that's not required.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
[Couldn't resist a quote on evolution and a quote by Mencken.]
Only some people get what they want. Those are the people who show up to get it.
Dianne Houston, Take The Lead, 2006
[I've got a saying: "90% of life is showing up. The rest…
evolgen | August 18, 2006Phylogeny Friday is back, bitches! Katherine's gotta add me to her list ASAP. In the glorious return of PhyFridays, I give you the root of the tree of life. In the upcoming editions we'll zoom in on a few parts of the tree to illustrate the diversity of certain taxa of interest. It'll be kind of like a reverse Ancestor's Tale.
The image on your left shows the evolutionary relationships of the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. Traditionally, the bacteria and archaea are known as prokaryotes, but prokaryotes are a paraphyletic taxon. Oh, how I hate paraphyletic taxa.…
evolgen | August 17, 2006Is it possible to have a news item about college football, with people whose names remind you of musical legends, washed up rockers, and supporting actors in a Peter North movie? Could this be the perfect intersection of sports, pop culture, and dirty jokes? This story reads like a casting call for a John Holmes movie, not a preseason roster move by a college football coach. Houston Nutt (which is a funny name on its own), the head coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks, has named his starting quarterback for the first game of the season. He selected Robert Johnson (no one's sure if the Devil will…
evolgen | August 17, 2006David at the World's Fair wants to know what makes a good viral campaign:
Essentially, as scientific types who tend to analyse, over-analyse, supra-analyse things, and who like to categorize and follow empirical trends, I'm interesting in hearing what you think it is that sparks these viral outbursts of information outreach? This question (and apologies for its convolution) also relates directly to your role as a blogger, where the assumption is that you revel in increased traffic, and are kind of looking for these tricks anyway. I guess, I'm just interested in hearing a scientist's opinion…
evolgen | August 17, 2006David Haussler and colleagues have identified a 118 base pair sequence that has evolved really fast along the human lineage relative to the chimpanzee lineage (Carl Zimmer has a good review). In fact, this sequence differs by two base pairs out of 118 between chimpanzees and chickens, and 18 out of 118 between chimps and humans. Differences in relative rates usually indicate changes in selection regimes along at least one lineage. These changes could be due to increased selective constraint along one lineage, relaxed constraint, or adaptive evolution. More on that later.
Also interesting is…
evolgen | August 16, 2006Check out this interview with Penn State football coach Joe Paterno:
On the fragility of life: "I do a lot of walking, and every once in a while, I step on an ant. And I say to myself, 'You know, we ain't nothing but ants.' "
I wonder if JoePa has ever looked at the back of a dollar bill . . . on weed. The boys at EDSBS think JoePaPa (the extra "Pa" is 'cause he's freakin' old . . . older than dirt, even) has been dabbling in a little E.O. Wilson:
So JoePa's either been reading chapter 27 of Sociobiology, or...well, the other option's just not possible.
Is Coach Paterno smokin' the doobies…
evolgen | August 16, 2006You all (or y'all or yins or whatever) know about the article in Science that says Americans are dumber than everyone on Earth except the Turkish (see the concise version from the NYTimes if you don't have access to Science). It's because we don't know jack shit about evolution. And we don't know jack shit about evolution because we don't know jack shit about genetics. Evolution? Genetics? I ain't interested in those things. Nope.
I'm probably the only ScienceBlogs blogger who didn't offer his 3¢ (inflation, bitches) on this issue. If I had, I would have written what John Hawks wrote, only…
evolgen | August 16, 2006There is a good biography of Ernst Mayr in the upcoming issue of Theoretical Population Biology. The author, Eviatar Nevo, provides both a summary of Mayr's work and distills his contributions into categories. I especially like how he explains Mayr's understanding of evolution (which he calls Darwinism, much to my chagrin) into five sub-theories:
For Mayr, a full understanding of the autonomy of biology is impossible without an analysis of Darwinism. Modern biology is conceptually Darwinian to a large extent. Mayr summarized this conceptual insight by showing that Darwinism basically embraces…