evolvingthoughts

On Friday I assessed an essay by a masters student on the evolution of reciprocity and altruism (she cleverly introduced a notion of benevolent behaviour rather than "altruism" in social contexts, to avoid confusion with genetic altruism. Then today my various feeds identified this rather…

One of the things I have previously discussed (see the "Best of ET" tab) is microbial species concepts. Two new papers have come out on this, and it seems to be a hot research topic right now. Eppley, et al., in the journal Genetics, argue that the claim that I happened to make in my as-yet…

Jason Rosenhouse, of Evolutionblog, has posted a rather snarky review of a book review by the historian and philosopher Ian Hacking that was published in The Nation. Jason titled his comment "How not to defend evolution". Here's my take on it. Jason thinks that Hacking was pretentious, that he…

All the strangers look like family All the family looks so strange The only constant I am sure of Is this accelerating rate of change — Peter Gabriel, Downside-Up, from the Ovo Album Creek Running North has a delightful rumination on the lack of a balance of nature, in which he notes that The…

When the Republicans began their deconstruction of American democracy, under Newt Gingrich, one of the immediate targets was the emasculation of the Office of Technology Assessment. Since that time, the Republicans have mangled, misused and rhetorically denied any science that failed to fit their…

Eagle-eyed readers will note a new tab above this post (and all others if I have done it properly) which list the very best of Evolving Thoughts - the meaty posts that will have long term value (as much as anything I write has value). If you are new here, or just want to see what absurd things I…

Larry Caldwell, a well-known proponent of antievolutionism, tried and failed to get "the controversy" taught in the school district of his kids' school. He failed, so he sued the school board because he was "discriminated against... for being Christian". The suit was just thrown out. What…

As a silverback, I am always intrigued when you humans start to debate our nature, or put us in silly films (not that the one with Sigourney was silly - any film she's in is fine by me. We don't get much film out here in the wild, anyway). But, courtesy of Jason Grossman, alpaca farmer…

Recently, that is since 1975 or so, the view has arisen that a living thing is something that satisfies several conditions. In 1966 George C. Williams introduced the notion of an "evolutionary gene" in his Adaptation and Natural Selection, which was, he said, a "cybernetic abstraction". This…

Ifnormation: what everybody thinks they know, if they don't think too much...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an online, but highly regarded, source of review articles on philosophical topics, edited by Ed Zalta. Three new articles have popped up lately that have attracted my attention: The first is on Metaphysics, by Peter van Inwagen. Metaphysics is a hard…

Now we turn to the modern accounts of life. In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler produced uric acid without using “kidney of man or dog”. Prior to that time, there was considered to be something different between organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry. Living things had some “vital fluid” that other…

theotre: a church or temple, wherein gods are displayed and perform...

So, you thought that Colony Collapse Disorder, which is causing billions of dollars in losses in American agriculture, was an act of nature? You poor fools! It's a plot, I tell yez. We Australians have hardier bees than you do, so they can carry an infectious disease that your weakly pathetic…

COSMOS magazine has an interesting article sure to stir up trouble by suggesting that, among other things, global organic farming would necessitate clearing all remaining forests and even then a substantial portion of the earth's population would starve. I don't know enough about this topic to…

I have, I must confess, started a number of projects here that I haven't finished. Teaching is getting the better of me (and no, I'm not going to put my lectures down on cognitive science, as I do them "freeform",, so I'd have to do a lot of work to get them down in written form). Some of the…

"It is incredible what people say under the compulsion of torture, and how many lies they will tell about themselves and about others; in the end whatever the torturers want to be true is true." Friedrich Spee von Lagenfeld, S.J., 1633

Carl Zimmer has one of his usually clear and precise articles on recent work on the nature of life, focussing on the work of Carol Cleland, who is at the National Astrobiology Institute, despite reduced funding for actual science by the present administration. I met Carol last year when we both…

I have decided that I am sick and tired of the antievolutionists. When I got into this game about 15 years or more ago, I thought that if we just argued and presented information about what evolution really is, and what it means for modern thinking, people would move away from attacking evolution…

If you're reading this on "Science Blog", be aware that the site is stealing, copying without proper attribution, and generally parasitising real blogs, including mine. Go to the real Science Blogs site for information on the actual blogs. Although I have a Creative Commons license, this doesn't…

Continuing on from my last post, let's consider the modes of speciation that are called into account for the existence of species. Here is a list taken from Sergey Gavrilets, which I put in my most recent paper in Biology and Philosophy (2007). Vicariant – divergent selection and stochastic…

A lot of people have said something like "species are the units of evolution". What does this even mean? So far as I can tell, nobody has really fleshed this out. What, to begin, are the units of evolution? It depends a lot on what theory is being employed. If you are talking about population…

Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil "Lucy" to the US with the closing paragraph: It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious…

So they're remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still? So what? I have more respect for Keanu Reeves after seeing the recent film A Scanner Darkly, and anyway he's much better an actor than Will Ferrell, who did such a good job in Stranger than Fiction to my surprise. But why angst over a remake?…

I'm very late to this, but one of the significant figures in the synthesis, Verne Grant, died in May. Grant's book The Origin of Adaptations (1963) was one that influenced a lot of theorising about evolution. His essay on species concepts in 1957 pointed out that botanical notions of species had…

As part of the "War on Drugs" an entire family of hydroponics sellers, selling legally available material, were sentenced to prison without parole. Gary Tucker has just been released after a ten year stretch and confiscation of all his goods and money. His brother Steve died of cancer in prison.…

The "angry atheist" debate has broken out again, like a fire that smolders on until it finds new fuel. I am moved to make a few points, which are worth all you paid for them. 1. There is an assumption that reasonable people can only come to one conclusion. To theists this is theism of some kind…

You'll remember, because you have all memorised my blog going back two years, that I blogged on what microbial species are before, and have a paper on that subject coming out in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. In it I argue that microbial species, particularly bacterial species, are…

The National Geographic and the news services are touting a new ape fossil found in Ethiopia as "forcing a rethink on human evolution". As usual, the headlines are hyperbolic. This ape is fragmentary, and so far only teeth and a jaw bone have been found, and the teeth are similar to gorilla teeth…

Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull. The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in…