gregladen | June 29, 2008 Proto Stephen Jay Gould OMFSM you are not going to believe this. Over at the University of Chicago, someone is making a terrible fool of themselves. It is hard to say if this is Shankar Vedantam, the Washing Post Staff Writer, or Patterson Clark of the Washington Post or someone else.
The title of the piece is "And the evolutionary beat goes on..."
The piece contains a flash multimedia item that shows the face of a lemur evolving, through a series of other primates, into the face of Stpehen Jay Gould, White Anglo Male. Is there a moment in which he resembles an African person?…
gregladen | June 29, 2008
On this day in 1895, T. H. Huxley died at the age of 70. Huxley was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" because of his defense of Darwin's important work in evolution. He debated Samuel Wilberforce in 1860, and people have been debating creationists since.
Huxley invented the term "agnostic" and described himself as one.
gregladen | June 28, 2008Our local paper, the Star Tribune is re-printing a New York Times story on the Philidelphia "Year of Evolution" .... Which is just fine. But the story has a comment section and it would sure be nice to have a few more pro-evolution comments on it. Please consider contributing to it, here.
Hope you get a chance to do it and that the Strib does not make it too difficult.
gregladen | June 28, 2008Nicholas Negroponte talks about how One Laptop per Child is doing, two years in. Speaking at the EG conference while the first XO laptops roll off the production line, he recaps the controversies and recommits to the goals of this far-reaching project.
gregladen | June 28, 2008There is new information from an older idea (from about 2000) by Paul Sherman and colleagues. The idea underlying this research is simple: Symptoms of illnesses may be adaptive. Indeed, this may be true to the extent that we should not call certain things illnesses. Like "morning sickness."
Broadly speaking, there are two different kinds of reasons that a woman may experience nausea in association with pregnancy. 1) This pregnancy thing is a complicated mess with all kinds of hormonal (and other) things going on, so you puke; or 2) a woman who is pregnant feels nauseous for good…
gregladen | June 27, 2008
Perhaps judging a man by his cologne isn't as superficial as it seems.
Duke University researchers, using sophisticated machinery to analyze hundreds of chemical components in a ringtailed lemur's distinctive scent, have found that individual males are not only advertising their fitness for fatherhood, but also a bit about their family tree as well.
"We now know that there's information about genetic quality and relatedness in scent," said Christine Drea, a Duke associate professor of biological anthropology and biology. The male's scent can reflect his mixture of genes, and to which…
gregladen | June 26, 2008 to get is phone. He even brought some muscle. Some tough looking guy.
He tried to claim the fish was his, of course. He was like "Yea, I had that in my pocket. I was gonna eat it later" and shit. But I didn't even listen 'cause I remembered it from last month, not making it home from the store in all. It was in the car the whole time.
Which all leads me to ask: What ARE all those spaces where things can fall into and get lost in your car doing there? Can't they be designed OUT of the system?
gregladen | June 26, 2008... is certainly still in the future. But we have seen a step in that direction in a new paper, coming out this week in Science. This research applies intensive and extensive genomic analysis to the avian phylogenetic tree. The results are interesting.
This paper is summarized in a number of locations, most notably here on Living the Scientific Life. Here, I will summarize it only very briefly. However, there are two observations I would like to make about this paper and its apparent meaning. One has to do with the nature of science, and the other has to do with the nature of…
gregladen | June 26, 2008Join Zuska and her commenters in a pile on regarding the Smithsonian Magazine's recent article on the archaeology of southern Africa.
It's racist, it's sexist, and it's even anti-Neanderthal. (The article, not Zuska's post)
Regarding the writing about the use of stone tool technology in the article:
It says, "could be women - but no one really knows, do they? The safe bet is on men." It's the equivalent of saying "the PC police are always watching, so we'd better pretend like there is an actual possibility that we are including women in this discussion, even though we know we're talking…
gregladen | June 26, 2008This is not a time to be profound. This is a time to rehydrate and make some more coffee. And search around for stuff that fell out of pockets.
I normally do not blog very many day to day details of my private life, especially regarding other people, because it is obnoxious to know someone who could at any point arbitrarily write in a very public way about anything that happens to occur at dinner, anything a person may say, and so on. But I have a small story about last night when I went out (and I never go out, so that in itself is kind of an event).
The plan was simple: I would stop…
gregladen | June 25, 2008
Click here for the full post by Gallup.
Far more Democrats believe in evolution than do those pesky Republicans. Interestingly, the configuration for "independents" looks just like the configuration for Democrats, not Republicans.
These results are mirrored, as usual, by the differential religiosity of these groups. God created or guided thinking is linked to going to church. and so on.
What is even more interesting is the upcoming/current issueof Skeptical Inquirer, which has a short article by ME in it, on a related issue.
John Lynch has also commented on this.
gregladen | June 24, 2008Sometimes boys are worth more, sometimes girls are worth more. In an evolutionary sense. Or, more correctly, the value of a certain sex ... as an offspring ... can be measured in fitness terms. Fisher noted this and hypothesized this was the explanation for the 50-50 sex ratio we usually see. As one sex becomes more rare, it becomes more valuable, and thus parents (mothers, perhaps, usually) bias towards that sex. Then the disparity goes away and thus the differential value goes away.
Of course, the truth is that we don't actually see the 50-50 sex ratio all the time ... many species…