gregladen | February 13, 2009... and some other guy ...
You must go to just after six minutes 20 second. And then it's like, one second long. But there is is.
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Quiz: Who first and most consistently against slavery, Lincoln or Darwin?
gregladen | February 12, 2009
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 (5 - 25) are distinctly different and contradictory origin stories. The biblical origin story represented in this text has long been known to resemble a set of Sumerian stories that mainly deal with a multitude of gods interacting (some of these gods are converted to humans in the biblical version). What is consistent about all of these stories is the relationship between status and labor, in the context of a labor-intensive agricultural system.
Genesis 1 is very systematic, resembling a post-hoc construction of events, and its main practical purpose may be to…
gregladen | February 12, 2009... and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped by accident.
That would be the way it would happen if two chimps walked into a bar. Or imagine two chimps, and each finds a nice juicy bit of fruit out in the forest. And instead of eating the fruit, because they are not hungry, they carry it around for a while (this would never happen, but pretend) and then accidentally run…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question:
How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems,…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are…
gregladen | February 12, 2009In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of biogeography and evolution.
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In the vicinity of Rio Tercero...
Hearing ... of the remains of one of the old giants, which a man told me he had seen on the banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Seed Magazine has a Darwin 200 page, here. It is loaded with cool Darwin stuff. Enjoy!
gregladen | February 12, 2009There are a few items related to Darwin's Birthday on QM. Please have a look here, where you will find links.
gregladen | February 12, 2009And hominids.
We know the fossil record underestimates diversity at least a little, and we know that forested environments in Africa tend to be underrepresented. Given this, the diversity of Miocene apes may have been rather impressive, because there is a fairly high diversity in what we can assume is a biased record.
But I'd like to make the argument from another angle, that of modern ecological analogues. Let us assume that the greater apparent diversity of apes in the middle and late Miocene compared today can be accurately translated as a modern reduction in ape diversity. Not…
gregladen | February 11, 2009Star Trek, the old Twilight Zone, and more. Here.
The technology is not perfect. But it will evolve.
gregladen | February 11, 2009As a child in Catholic school, and later in public school and being sent off to "release time" religious instruction, I had the opportunity to read most of the Old and New Testaments of the standard bible. Later, in junior high school, I became interested in comparative religion, and read it all again, together with some other texts that are not normally considered part of the Bible. Then all that fell to the wayside as I went off to do different things.
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In graduate school, I was lucky to have Irv DeVore as my primary advisor (eventually ... it did not start out that way). In fact…
gregladen | February 11, 2009A Bolivian woman has died from an injection of urine allegedly administered by her friend as a form of health therapy, a prosecutor said Tuesday. Investigating prosecutor Oscar Flores told The Associated Press that 35-year-old Gabriela Ascarrunz died Saturday of an "infection caused by urine that was injected by fashion designer Monica Schultz."
Local newspapers reported that Schultz, who is known across Bolivia for her clothing lines, is a practitioner of urine therapy -- a form of alternative medicine using human urine for cosmetic purposes or to treat various diseases. Some people rub it…
gregladen | February 11, 2009
CALL TO ACTION: Ask your Representative to oppose the H.R. 801 - The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act
(from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access)
February 11, 2009
Last week, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Rep. John Conyers, D-MI) re-introduced a bill that would reverse the NIH Public Access Policy and make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place. The legislation is H.R. 801: the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.801:).
Please contact your Representative no later than February 28, 2009…
gregladen | February 11, 2009Everyone knows about Darwin's Finches, of the Galapagos Islands. But of course, Darwin made observations of birds throughout his travels on The Beagle. Here, I present a number of passages from The Voyage that include some of these observations.
Struthio Rhea
I will now give an account of ... the Struthio Rhea, or South American ostrich. This bird is well known to abound over the plains of Northern Patagonia, and the united provinces of La Plata. It has not crossed the Cordillera; but I have seen it within the first range of mountains on the Uspallata plain.... The ordinary habits of the…
gregladen | February 11, 2009I am the least musical person I've ever met who is still alive. Of course, most nonmusical people don't go around talking about it, so I probably actually know more tone deaf, talentless people than that. It is strange, though. I should be musical. My mother sang semiprofessionally, doing radio in the pre-WWII days before they had things on tape (commercials and stuff). My oldest sister is known as Lightning Fingers Liz, owing to her prowess with the mandolin. My brother had a rock band from something like 1968 through 1990-something and is quite talented with the lead guitar. My other…
gregladen | February 11, 2009The following is the latest missive from Shawn Otto:
Last Friday you and others in the science community took action and helped to restore $3.1 billion in cuts to science that had been planned in the Senate compromise version of the stimulus bill. That was a good victory for U.S. Science, but it was just the warm-up act. Now we all need to come together as a community for the real show.
Even after the $3.1 billion restoration, the final approved Senate version of the stimulus bill falls far short of the House version when it comes to science and technology. You can look at the differences…
gregladen | February 10, 2009As I grow older and experience more and more of life, I increasingly think that this is a lesson individuals either get early or simply never get at all.
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