Darwin 200

RIchard Dawkins - holy shit, that Chimpy is contagious, he infected PZ with typo's.

No flash player, so no shiny watching for me. Anyone mind posting the gist of it in a bit more detail than PZ did?

I'm reading it right now and enjoying a piece of Porsche-flavored chewing gum.

PZ, you're too modest. This has been out a while now. I read it a few weeks ago. I think. Sheesh, with my new schedule, it's tough to gauge the passage of time...

I'm reading it now also and enjoying a cup of hot chocolate. The Porsche-flavored chewing gum sounds tasty.

What does Porsche taste like?

How about a PDF version?

That flash version is only for people with serious screen real estate.

I read this Jan 15. It was great then too!

Why do you need Flash for this anyway? It's good that it's "carbon neutral" though. Er, what does that mean exactly?

Che: PFCG tastes like a 747.

Porsche Tasking Chewing Gum --- there is no substitute.

Sort of OT, and for any Pharyngulites in the San Antonio area: As part of several Darwin celebrations here, Roy Zimmerman will perform at the UU church on Valentine's Day.

It's a FREE event.

Woo hoo! Just got the notification from an atheist group here in SA. Now Mr. Aquaria and I do have plans for Valentine's Day!

:)

There's also very little screen real estate on this netbook, so on-line reading of the article is impossible. But the flash player loads it and has a little print button. Viola! Lots of pixels on the printer.

I really liked the Lenski article which I read first. I'm sure I'll like the others. I'm in the midst of Carl Zimmer's (author of the Lenski article) book right now also. Very good.

Maybe Santonio Holmes could give the UVM speech? He's certainly more qualified.

Uh oh! Speaking of British media activities, the latest issue of SPECTATOR has a review of a book entitled 'Why Us?' by James Le Fanu in which the reviewer, Christopher Booker, seems to be admonishing scientists for not taking seriously the need to use religious faith and creationism to explain the '..... whole mass of interdependent changes to take place simultaneously, such as the transformation of reptiles into feathered, hollow-boned and warm blooded birds".

I can't believe Jones would argue that evolution has stopped.

Uh, ever heard Hardy-Weinberg? We aren't satisfying those conditions any time soon.

This is clearly OT - sorry. I use Amazon to look up books and sometimes I buy them there, although my wife berates me for not ordering and buying at the local bookstores. I understand, so I called the local Borders to see if they had "Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment," by Phil Zuckerman.

I was told that Borders had it in their database, but would not offer this in the stores is selected markets -- and not in mine ... hmmmm?

I live in Santa Fe, NM. Wonder what this means?

Glad to see you argued for the "duh of course we're still evolving you moron" position. Seriously, just because we don't have as many constraints on simple survival doesn't mean we've eliminated genetic diversity and differential reproductive success!

I also enjoyed reading it in Flash format since I just today figured out how to make my eeePC output to my 24" monitor in 1920x1200 resolution.

I can't believe Jones brought up Osama Bin Laden in his argument that evolution has stopped.

Unsporting PZ, you should have left that typo until the BigDumbChimp saw it.

What a disappointment.

I'll wait until I can get a HTML/pdf/text version I can actually read without altering my video settings and panning around.

Bah.

Don: "How about a PDF version?
That flash version is only for people with serious screen real estate."

Not if you click on an article - it expands to show half a page - OK on my 15 inch CRT.

I can't believe Jones brought up Osama Bin Laden in his argument that evolution has stopped.

If he brought up Bush, Ben Stein, or Cheny, one could argue that it is going backward at warp speed!!!

Seriously, if anything evolution of humans is increasing. We just entered a new niche never before seen in nature. Civilization.

Most likely, selection is occurring for resistance to ubiquitous man made chemicals, for ability to adapt to rapid change, operate an ever increasing number of devices, and deal with large numbers of conspecifics, many of whom are crazy or stupid.

I second the notion for a PDF.
Flash is an evil proprietary format (and there's /still/ no x86_64 mozilla plugin). PDF is at least a real open standard...

I notice that most comment are about Flash player rather than the articles. I vote for the No side. PZ writes well, clearly and convincingly. Jones writes well, but he tends to do what first year university English composition students do, use expressions like "in the old days." There is no time indicated for these "old days," and for first year university students 08/09, "the old days" or "olden days" are the 1970s or 1980s. Furthermore, Jones' argument about infant mortality is unconvincing, but I'm not sure why.

For everyone on the US side of the big pond who's looking forward to David Attenborough's programme on Charles Darwin, can I just let you all know (as a Brit) that it's every bit as good as everyone over here expected.

Oh, and as a bit of a treat, the show includes this magnificent segment explaining the tree of life.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=H6IrUUDboZo

Enjoy.

I like PZ's comment about the necessity of being able to score with girls at the big dance.

I'm glad I'm out of it. I couldn't even go to the dance. It's an awful environment, even if there are more good looking chicks than you can shake a stick at.

Think of the main (male) characters in "The Big Bang Theory". I think that guys like that are surely going to be at a reproductive disadvantage in a society that seems to value appearance above substance, or trendiness above intellectual ability.

If I'm correct, that doesn't bode well for the further evolution of our species in terms of enhanced intellectual ability. Maybe this dumbing down factor is common to any putative social, intelligent species, once they've reached a certain level of development, & that's why we've (probably) never been visited by aliens?

"good-looking", "dumbing-down". Sorry about the missing hyphens.

Your explanation is excellent for this non-biologist, PZ. I'm happy for your students.

Download PDF version

Enjoy!

> That flash version is only for people with serious screen real estate.

I've got 23" 1920x1200 and it's still horrible - so much so that I won't go to the effort of trying to zoom / drag / click to read the damn thing.

Whoever thought Yudu was a good publishing format should be made to watch Expelled ten times in a row.

Unsporting PZ, you should have left that typo until the BigDumbChimp saw it.

Me fail english? That's unpossible.

Sorry, I haven't read the transcript yet nor seen the video, but if I recall correctly, (froma previous thread here) Jones' point was not that evolution had stopped, but that for humans, natural selection no longer applied. For example, genetic variation that would have killed our anscestors 50,000 years ago are survivable with modern medicine. That we have largely become the directors of our own evolution. That we could work to keep our genome static or drive it whatever direction we like.

Think of the main (male) characters in "The Big Bang Theory". I think that guys like that are surely going to be at a reproductive disadvantage in a society that seems to value appearance above substance, or trendiness above intellectual ability.

If I'm correct, that doesn't bode well for the further evolution of our species in terms of enhanced intellectual ability.

That's assuming intelligence is an inheritable feature. Given that it seems society has always valued appearance over substance, power over intellect, I don't think there is any reason to believe that intelligence won't always be a normal distribution of intelligent, average, and stupid people.

Any statistics on the progeny of the "Nobel Sperm Bank" yet?

I was NOT impressed by Jones' argument, partly because he does not account for lots of confounding influences on the number of children fathered by some historical men (the number of men in the history of our species who have fathered more than a few children is probably laughably minute), and partly because he makes the standard sexist bullshit mistake of making "reproductive success" only something that only men have. We also don't have an accounting of how many of those 888 children reproduced themselves - probably quite a few, but probably not all of them. Reproductive success has to do with how many of your offspring themselves survive to reproduce, not how many you provide the genetic material for. Jones would also do well to remember that, of the 20,424 chromosomes provided by Moulay Ismael for those 888 children, approximately half of the genetic material in them came from a woman: Moulay Ismael's mother.

"Jones' point was not that evolution had stopped, but that for humans, natural selection no longer applied."

Yeah, SteveM, that was his point, but so what? It's still outrageously foolish and naive to believe that natural selection has stopped in humans. Disease, hunger and violence are only the most obvious selective factors, and even there, it's pretty stupid to assume that natural selection with respect to these factors has stopped. Mutations are rarely purely beneficial or purely bad - sickle-cell anemia is a great example of a genetic disorder that appears to have a very detrimental effect, but it also turns out to confer a high level of resistance to malaria.

By and large, yes, the bases of natural selection in humans have probably shifted, but probably not diminished. Remember - large brain size and the ability to develop things like civilization, technology and medicine is just another trait. One that happens to have powerful emergent properties, yes, but still very much selectable in subtle and powerful ways.

I found the article bizarre.

1. Natural selection won't stop, ever.

2. Even if natural selection stopped that would surely just increase the diversity of the gene pool, because natural selection works to decrease the variation.

SteveM That's assuming intelligence is an inheritable feature.

It certainly has a degree of heritability.

Given that it seems society has always valued appearance over substance, power over intellect, I don't think there is any reason to believe that intelligence won't always be a normal distribution of intelligent, average, and stupid people.

I may be older than you. I've seen changes in how society responds - I think that the geek is at a greater disadvantage now than in previous generations. I can't prove this, of course, but it's my judgement. I strongly suspect that there will be fewer kids sired by geeks now than in the past.

There will be various factors influencing this, such as the relative earning power of geeks in various generations. I suspect that this is in decline. Science & engineering jobs are usually rather poorly paid.

Curious to read a side by side contrast where the evolutionary developmental biologist has a better grip on developments in genetics than a geneticist. What has amazed me about recent genetic research is the extent of the complexity of gene expression and regulation that is being discovered. I direct you to Jan 22, 2009, "Nature" special section on RNA Silencing where regulation, interference and other aspects of activity in the deep genome is being explored to get a sense of what's in store for us.

Marc Abian, #37: "2. Even if natural selection stopped that would surely just increase the diversity of the gene pool, because natural selection works to decrease the variation."

I know that this thread is basically dead, but I couldn't let this go - it is not, strictly speaking, correct. Natural selection can work in a few different ways. In what is called disruptive selection, the two tails of a trait distribution in a population have higher fitness than the center of that distribution (e.g. very large feet or very small feet have high fitness, but average-sized feet have low fitness). The result of this kind of selection is an increase in diversity or variation, NOT a decrease. The fact that natural selection sometimes increases diversity is probably a major factor in speciation. Think about it - if selection cannot increase diversity, than where does the biological diversity that we see come from? Right - natural selection.