Search Content

Displaying results 87751 - 87800 of 87950

Sunday Chess Problem

This past week has mostly been devoted to working on my magnum opus about mathematical anti-evolutionism. That has meant lots of frustrating hours staring at the computer trying to make words appear, coupled with many more annoying hours wading through poorly written creationist pseudomath. But miracles do happen, since I actually finished a first draft tonight! Alas, it's currently eleven thousand words (not including bibliography and abstract) which is way too long for a journal article. (Maybe I can find some way to turn it into two articles!) Whole sections are going to need to be…

World Chess Championship Begins!!

Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! Just try to guess why I am so excited right now. I dare you, just try. I'll even give you some time... Okay, so maybe the title gave it away. The long awaited (among chess fans anyway) match between Viswanathan Anand of India and Vladimir Kramnik of Russia begins today. To fully understand the importance of this match, let me lay some history on you. In 1972 Bobby Fischer played defending champion Boris Spassky for the title. After twenty-one of the scheduled twenty-four games the match was mathematically over. In the weeks that followed Fischer was appearing on…

Blogging Dawkins, Chapter One

The other day I sallied forth to the local Barnes and Noble to pick up my copy of Richard Dawkins's new book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. As I walked into the store I noticed a person stacking books on the main kiosk. She asked me if I was looking for something in particular. Now, ordinarily I would have said something like, “No thanks, I'm good.” I spend so much time hanging out at Barnes and Noble, you see, that I'm pretty certain I know the layout of the store better than most of the people who work there. Besides, half the fun of browsing is all the must-…

Quantum Computing in Diamond

Two weeks ago, now, I promised some peer=reviewed physics blogging, to compensate for the "screechy monkey" nonsense. Of course, I got distracted by other things, but I've been sitting on this paper for a while now, and I really need to get it off my desk. The paper in question is "Quantum Register Based on Individual Electronic and Nuclear Spin Qubits in Diamond," by the group of Misha Lukin at Harvard, published in Science last June. It's a clever idea for a way to do quantum computing using individual nuclear spins in a diamond matrix. I really like this idea, not least because it has the…

Substance over sweetness — another New Atheist critique gone askew

Another of those common, erroneous strategies used to criticize those danged Gnu Atheists is to first invent a definition for New Atheism that the Gnu Atheists themselves would find foreign, and then to jump all over it for a prolonged period of time until they've convinced themselves they've finally defeated their nemesis. It's the cardboard cutout tactic — it turns out that cardboard versions of us put up much less of a fight than the real thing. I'm afraid Stephen Asma has committed the same error. He has written a long, meandering essay that accuses the New Atheists of having a narrow…

Everything in Pi... maybe.

George Takei posted the following thing to Facebook recently: It got reposted by a bunch of people and provoked a tremendous amount of discussion (for a math topic, anyway), much of which was somewhere in the continuum between merely wrong and psychedelically incoherent. It's not a new subject - a version of the image got discussed on Stack Exchange last year - but it's an interesting one and hey, it's not all that often that the subtle properties of the set of real numbers get press on Facebook. Let's do a taxonomy of the real numbers and see what we can figure out about pi and whether or…

Not Even Not Even Wrong - Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design

Isaac Newton, when he wasn't revolutionizing mathematics and almost single-handedly inventing physics as a systematic discipline, wrote some really ridiculous stuff. Alchemy, occult esoterica, you name it. In his defense, it was the 1600s. He didn't have a whole lot of prior scientific understanding to help him sort the wheat from the chaff. Until he reached the age at which the position is traditionally handed to a successor, Stephen Hawking occupied Isaac Newton's chair at Cambridge University. I don't know what his excuse is. Stephen Hawking's book The Grand Design should be read by all…

The Worst Physics Article Ever

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the worst physics news article I have ever seen: Freaky Physics Proves Parallel Universes Exist Every word in the title is wrong but "physics". It's not freaky, doesn't prove anything we didn't already know, and has nothing to do with parallel universes nor does it shed any light the question of their possible existence. Look past the details of a wonky discovery by a group of California scientists -- that a quantum state is now observable with the human eye -- and consider its implications: Time travel may be feasible. Doc Brown would be proud. Quantum…

What are we going to do about the Marc Moranos of this world?

And now, in another edition of "I was going to ignore this, but," I draw your attention to the latest career move of one Marc Morano and his unwavering campaign to undermine public support for any and all policies that might give us a chance to forestall catastrophic climate change I was hoping that Morano, the former pseudo-journalist who first rose to prominence by serving as chief propagandist for the Swift Boat veterans who helped defeat John Kerry's presidential bid in 2004, would just go away after leaving the employ of Republican Sen. James "global warming is a hoax" Inhofe a few weeks…

OMG QIP=PSPACE!

Today on the arXiv an new paper appeared of great significance to quantum computational complexity: arXiv:0907.4737 (vote for it on scirate here) Title: QIP = PSPACE Authors: Rahul Jain, Zhengfeng Ji, Sarvagya Upadhyay, John Watrous We prove that the complexity class QIP, which consists of all problems having quantum interactive proof systems, is contained in PSPACE. This containment is proved by applying a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proofs. As the…

One More Thing You Shouldn't Inhale: The Past and Future (But No Present) of Carbon Nanotubes and Asbestos

This post was written by guest contributor Cyrus Mody.* There's a new study reported in Nature Nanotechnology entitled "Carbon nanotubes introduced into the abdominal cavity of mice show asbestos-like pathogenicity in a pilot study." Or, as the title seems to have been understood by reporters at the New York Times and elsewhere, "Blah NANO blah blah blah ASBESTOS blah PATHOGEN blah blah." The gist of the original Nature Nano study is this: (1) we know asbestos fibers, once heralded as a godsend, can cause mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs. (2) We know this has something to…

Rapid Cognitive Improvement in Alzheimer's following anti-TNF alpha treatment

This paper was covered by CNN last week, and I didn't have a chance to talk about it then. It is a case study by Tobinick and Gross in the Journal of Neuroinflammation where a patient with Alzheimer's disease (AD) injected intrathecally (into their spinal fluid) with a TNF-alpha antagonist called etanercept showed rapid and consistent improvement in cognitive function. I want to talk both about the reasons for skepticism and for optimism in this study. Tobinick and Gross describe an 81 year old patient with late Alzheimer's disease. The patient was being treated with intrathecal…

Videos of AMPA-R Insertion

One of the mechanisms -- perhaps even the primary mechanism -- by which synapses in the brain are potentiated -- made more sensitive to activation -- is the insertion of more AMPA receptors (AMPA-R) into the synapse. AMPA-R are glutamate-activated, cation (Na and Ca) channels that are really the business end of creating the electrical activity in the post-synaptic cell. Their insertion is activated by the Ca admitted by another cation channel, the NMDA receptor. Basically long-term potentiation (LTP) -- which we believe is the primary storage form of memories on a cellular level -- of…

Why do we vote?

I always get in arguments with mathematically-inclined people about whether to vote or not. The mathematically-inclined point out very reasonably that the chances of your vote being decisive are perishingly slim. (These mathematics are explained clearly in this PBS video by economist Gordon Tullock explaining why he does not vote. Hat-tip: Marginal Revolution) But there is always a part of me that believes there has to be more to the story. My intuition is that if there really was no practical purpose, people wouldn't do it. The behavioral scientist in me argues that if a behavior has no…

Perry Marshall 2.0

This is weird. Perry Marshall has posted a complete transcript of our discussion on Unbelievable on his website. That's actually useful, since most of us can read faster than someone else can talk. What's weird is that he's annotated it with his rebuttals, after the fact. It's like -- and this has happened to me -- you give a student an exam, and they do poorly on it, and they come in to your office to argue for more points not by pointing out errors in the grading (that happens, too), but by explaining to you how their understanding of the material was vastly superior to yours, and that you'…

What's Wrong With These Scholarships?

Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science writes about prizes for women: 2008 is the tenth year of the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year's award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.) In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with…

Does Brownback Really Reject Science?

You may recall that Senator Sam Brownback, erstwhile Presidential candidate, recently wrote a NYTimes op-ed expounding on his raising of the arm during a presidential debate in response to the now-infamous "who doesn't believe in evolution" question. I'm grateful to Page 3.14 for alerting me to Jerry Coyne's article Don't Know Much Biology written in response to Senator Sam Brownback. I am generally a fan of Jerry Coyne, and this piece is as well-written as anything of his. But on this I think he misses the mark, as do many scientists who criticize the ID brigade, some of my Sciblings…

What's Wrong With This Statement?

Jokerine wrote in respone to Let Her Eat the Oppressor's Cake: had a discussion in my group today about affirmative action. One of the guys comented that if we promoted women in male fields soon all groups on the fringes of society would ask for prefferential treatment. I couldn't figure out what was bothering me for a while, but wait a minute since when are women a fringe group. And this from a man that considers himself liberal and progressive. Poor Rachel, one day her eyes will open and she will see how much worse she is off as a woman. I'll be there for her to come crying to. No indeedy,…

Dawkins on the nose again

In response to the unwarranted flap over the education director of the Royal Society making comments that of course the media and the creationists spun to suit themselves, Richard Dawkins had this to say: Although I disagree with Michael Reiss, what he actually said at the British Association is not obviously silly like creationism itself, nor is it a self-evidently inappropriate stance for the Royal Society to take. Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who 'respect' creationists while disagreeing with them; and the rest of us, who see no reason to…

What negative political campaigns have to do with "Pride and Prejudice"

A particular source of dread for politicians is how to respond to negative campaigning or other information impugning their character. By responding, they might only bring attention to an issue that voters hadn't even recognized: "Contrary to my opponent's claims, I have stopped beating my wife, and I haven't consumed more than a fifth of hard liquor in a single sitting." Worse, many studies have found that even unequivocal denials fail to register in memory. In one study, participants read a report about the possible cause of a fire: a room full of oil paint and pressurized gas cylinders.…

In Defense of D-wave

The Optimizer has gotten tired of everyone asking him about D-wave and gone and written a tirade about the subject. Like all of the optimizer's stuff it's a fun read. But, and of course I'm about to get tomatoes thrown on me for saying this, I have to say that I disagree with Scott's assessment of the situation. (**Ducks** Mmm, tomato goo.) Further while I agree that people should stop bothering Scott about D-wave (I mean the dudes an assistant professor at an institution known for devouring these beasts for breakfast), I personally think the question of whether or not D-wave will…

Do Women Have an Evolved Preference for Pink?

Short answer, no. Duh. Long answer, man do I hate how psychology gets reported in the media. If you were surfing around news sites earlier this week, you might have come across something like this: A study in Current Biology reports some of the first conclusive evidence in support of the long-held notion that men and women differ when it comes to their favorite colors. Indeed, the researchers found that women really do prefer pink--or at least a redder shade of blue--than men do. Which quickly turned into this: Girls Really Do Prefer Pink The attraction may owe to evolutionary influences,…

The End of Privacy

There have been stories and novels about the end of privacy.  1984, by George Orwell, comes to mind.  I also remember reading a science fiction short story once, about how technology had made privacy so difficult to maintain, and so accepted by society, that it was considered rude to want privacy.  I can't remember who wrote that one.   This post was inspired by an article in the Wall Street Journal, that points out how little privacy there is when it comes to medical records.  More below the fold... Time Magazine just published 25 "top-10" lists for 2006.  One of the lists is for href="…

Honorifics, credentials, and respect.

There's a lively discussion raging at the pad of Dr. Isis (here and here) about whether there isn't something inherently obnoxious and snooty about identifying oneself as having earned an advanced degree of any sort. Commenter Becca makes the case thusly: "Why are people threatened by the idea that a profession ought to have professional standards, anyway?" 1) It gives the gatekeepers even more power than they already have. Given a world where professional credentials are denied to certain groups, it can get a bit ugly. I think the worst part is that people who are traditionally trodden…

Donald Trump: A "monster shot" causes autism

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting imbibing the latest and greatest that science-based medicine has to offer against cancer. The AACR is mainly a basic science and translational meeting; so a lot of this stuff is seriously preclinical. That's what makes it interesting, though. In any case, my distraction aside, sometimes stuff happens that I still have to comment on and, better yet, sometimes it's the sort of stuff that I don't feel obligated to write an Orac-ian length screed about. In other words, it's perfect for keeping the blog active…

Why not just castrate them? (Part 8): The State of Maryland moves against David Geier

Well, well, well, well. Remember how recently autism quack Dr. Mark Geier finally ran afoul of Maryland's medical board for subjecting autistic children to unethical and potentially dangerous treatments with Lupron? Briefly, his license was suspended on an emergency basis, and, as a result, a lot of attention was brought to bear not just on the father, but on his son David Geier as well, who had been working with his father for years and, to all appearances, practicing medicine without a license. Personally, ever since I first learned of Mark and David Geier's dubious medicine six years ago,…

Missionaries of woo (a.k.a. "Woo Without Borders")

I had come across a rather amusing mea culpa by GruntDoc in which, while discussing an amazingly inappropriate notice regarding guidelines for emergency room chiropractic reimbursement, he admits to having in the past referred our best and bravest to chiropractors. I can understand why he did it, given the circumstances he described. However, what bothered me was this statement: In my six-plus years of being on-call in the hospital emergency department (ED), I have seen numerous ED physicians gain familiarity with the indications for chiropractic consultation. I have enjoyed seeing the…

Holiday weekend reader mailbag: In which Orac is chastised for "condemning someone who helps people"

The Thanksgiving holiday weekend continues here in the U.S., and, believe it or not, I plan on taking it fairly easy, hanging out with my wife and (hopefully) going to see the new Harry Potter movie later today or tonight. However, even so, I can't resist doing a bit of holiday mailbag fun, first because it's easy, but more importantly because this time around it's instructive. A new reader, who obviously found this blog through a Google search on something or other writes: Hello Orac, I stumbled across one of your blog pages and I felt compelled to share my story with you. Seven years ago I…

Animal rights: Fetishizing violence?

As much as I hate to bring more attention than I did a couple of days ago to the truly evil animal rights extremist website run by a truly despicable animal rights terrorist wannabe Camille Marino, a website whose very title, Negotiation Is Over (NIO) tells you everything you need to know about the attitude of the loons running the site, especially given their targeting of researchers' children for harassment, I can't help but notice that the efforts of fellow science bloggers and myself have been noticed, both at NIO and another animal rights site Thomas Paine Corner. Good. The reaction of…

Perception and reality in acupuncture

Last week, I wrote about an overhyped acupuncture study that purported to show (but didn't, really) that acupuncture is more effective than "conventional" therapy in the treatment of low back pain. This story reverberated through the Internet and blogosphere as "proof" that acupuncture "works" when in reality the study was very weak evidence of any effect due to needles being placed into the skin and only showed that meridians are a meaningless concept (i.e., the finding that sham acupuncture was just as effective "real" acupuncture). If acupuncture does do anything, this study was pretty…

Iranian President (and Holocaust denier) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Iranian President (and Holocaust denier) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed up at Columbia University yesterday to give a speech. Given my interest in Holocaust history and Holocaust denial I had debated whether to comment on it before it happened. Given my contempt for him, his anti-Semitism, and his Holocaust denial, I was rather torn by the whole affair. On the one hand, I am very much in favor of free speech, and having this loon speak can in one way be argued to be evidence of what is great about this country (although it would have been more convincing if Columbia had a better record on this…

More stomping free speech flat in Europe: Genocide "denial" to be criminalized?

Remember how often I rail against misguided laws that seek to criminalize Holocaust denial, laws such as the one in Austria under which David Irving was imprisoned? I've referred to them more than once as "stomping free speech flat," and I still believe that's what they do. I've also pointed out the danger of a potential slippery slope, an assertion for which I've been criticized, sometimes vigorously. Well, take a look at this (via the History News Network): PEOPLE who question the official history of conflicts in Africa and the Balkans could be jailed for up to three years for "genocide…

Wild Wild West

A few posts back, I indicated that I was finished with travelling, and ready to settle into my classes at CU Boulder. Naturally, chaos has a way of affecting plans made with certainty. Sure enough, as soon as I returned from New York, I found myself packing my suitcase once again, this time to head to Wyoming and South Dakota for my grandpa’s funeral. The timing wasn’t wonderful; I had to miss a day of class, and ended up spending part of my "vacation time" studying. That’s where the chaotic parts played in. Of course, the subjects that I’m studying are intrinsically relevant to me,…

BBC allows quack Janet Thompson to promote herself on air

The BBC has a bit of a patchy track record when it comes to promoting pseudoscience. On the one hand, they've featured investigations into homeopaths and Brain Gym, on the other, various charlatans still manage to slip the editorial net and promote their particular flavour of quackery on air. This is one of the latter occasions. Last Wednesday, life coach Janet Thompson managed to bag herself a good chunk of air time on the Chris Evans Drive Time show on BBC Radio 2 to promote herself and make bizarre false claims about how the human body works. You can listen to the show here, the…

The saga of Avastin and breast cancer

One of the most frustrating aspects of taking care of cancer patients is that in general, with a handful of specific exceptions, we do not have good curative therapies for patients with stage IV cancer, particularly solid tumors. Consequently, we are forced to view patients with stage IV cancer as "incurable" because, the vast majority of the time, they are incurable. Over the years, we have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at patients with stage IV disease, largely with dissapointing results. That's not to say that the few specific exceptions to which I alluded are not a reason for…

Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution

There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years. By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the genome. By recent times, the authors mean various things, depending on which part of the analysis you examine, and depending on what is meant by "increased." ... In other words, the timing of an event that is not really an event (but rather a change in rate of something) is hard…

Grad school was great! I recommend it to everyone!

The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I've already answered, so I thought I'd just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question: What's a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back? But first, I have to mention that every scientist must have a nemesis or two, as has been recently documented in the pages of Narbonic. Thinking about graduate school? Here’s a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one…

How To Use Linux ~ 04 Instalilng Software

This is the fourth in a series of posts on using Ubuntu Linux specifically written for that select group of people who are smart but non-geek computer users who are using Linux because they are. Just are. How to Install and Remove Software There are a lot of ways to install software, and total geeks can make this really hard on themselves. You may not know this, but a software application usually needs to know how to exist on a wide range of systems and hardware configurations. Even within a given Operating System (OS), there are things the software has to do to compensate for a lot of…

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing: Why Too Many Y's?

I have yet to meet anyone who has read this book, myself included. But apparently some sciency blogger picked up a copy the other day and noticed a near absence of female scientists represented in the anthology. Why? Y, apparently. As you probably know, Richard Dawkins is presently being raked over blogospheric coals for having edited a volume of science writing that includes only about 3.6% of its works written by females. The observation was first made here at hgg, and has been discussed here at The Intersection, here at Aetiology, here at Questionable Authority, at Blue Lab Coats, here…

Animal rights terrorism advocate Dr. Jerry Vlasak: Murder of animal researchers is "morally acceptable"

I may have joked a bit about certain surgeons whom, because they say such dumb, pseudoscientific things with alarming regularity, I consider embarrassments to the noble profession that is surgery. Usually, it's been surgeons who reveal an astonishing ignorance of the science of evolution as they parrot long discredited and debunked canards about evolution while spouting creationist nonsense. You know about whom I speak: surgeons like neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor and general surgeon Dr. Henry Jordan. But, as mind-numbingly dumb as some of the things that, for example, Dr. Egnor has said…

In a fog and from a distance, Orac sees his hometown invaded

Regular readers may have noticed that the usual prodigious amount of verbiage has fallen off a bit over the last few days. That's just because I've been very busy and not always around a reliable Internet connection. In some ways, I almost like the way I've been forced to write a bit better in that my posts are shorter. However, I know that after I return home from San Diego, my old habits will probably return fairly quickly. I actually wasn't going to post anything today other than the plug for the Expelled Exposed website (oh, look! another plug!), mainly becauase I got in rather late last…

On Humanism

One of the various labels variously applied to the group of people who don't believe in the supernatural is "secular humanist." This emphasizes the importance of ethical behavior by and toward other humans. Indeed, you'll sometimes see "secular humanist" and "atheist" used interchangeably. Richard Dawkins seems determined to clarify the difference. In a piece written for the Los Angeles Times, he writes Saddam should have been studied, not executed, and argues in particular that: Hussein is not in the same league as Hitler, but, nevertheless, in a small way his execution represents a…

Basics: Friction

**Pre reqs:** [Free body diagrams](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-free-body-diagrams.php) Friction is an interaction between two objects in contact that opposes relative motion of those two objects. It is not something fundamental (like gravity, or electromagnetic force), but it comes up enough that it will be worthwhile to talk about it. Let me start with a simple example. Suppose I have a book on a table. Here is the free body diagram for the book:  Simple enough - right? There…

Power

The Economist reviews an interesting new study that investigates the immorality of power: In their first study, Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky asked 61 university students to write about a moment in their past when they were in a position of high or low power. Previous research has established that this is an effective way to "prime" people into feeling as if they are currently in such a position. Each group (high power and low power) was then split into two further groups. Half were asked to rate, on a nine-point morality scale (with one being highly immoral and nine being highly moral), how…

Fear of the frame, part II: A cultural divide

I remain confused. Yes, I know that people who don't like me very much or at least don't like the message that I lay down here day in, day out, week in, week out probably aren't surprised at this startling admission, but I don't mean it in a general fashion (although no doubt those aforementioned people will take it that way). No, in 10 days or so since I first weighed in about it, I remain confused at the vociferously hostile reaction that Chris Mooney's and Matthew Nisbet's recent article in Science, Framing Science, and their follow up article published on Sunday in the Washington Post.…

Sloppy Dualism on Bad Astronomy

In the history of this blog, I've gone after lots of religious folks. I've mocked lots and lots of christians, a few muslims, some Jews, some newagers, and even one stupid Hindu. Today, I'm doing something that's probably going to get me into trouble with a lot of readers. I'm going to mock a very well-known atheist. No, not PZ. As much as I disagree with PZ, as far as I can tell, he's consistent about his worldview. Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait has been a major voice for skepticism and a vocal proponent of atheism. He has, quite rightly, gone after people of all stripes for…

Rotating Ciphers

So, last time, we looked at simple substitution ciphers. In a substitution cipher, you take each letter, and pick a replacement for it. To encrypt a message, you just substitute the replacement for each instance of each letter. As I explained, it's typically pretty each to break that encryption - the basic secret of the encryption is the substitution system, and it's pretty easy to figure that out, because the underlying information being encrypted still has a lot of structure. There are a couple of easy improvements on a simple substitution cipher, some of which came up in the comments.…

Buddhism, a religion or not?

The comments for the post where I imply that Sam Harris is a religiously inclined individual addressed the topic of whether Buddhism is a religion or not. This is a common issue, and I tend to cause some irritation whenever I declare that Buddhism is a theistic religion, because that's not what you would read in books (or, Wikipedia). I'm generally a big fan of what books have to say, and defer to scholars in areas that I'm not familiar with, but, I've really come to the point where I simply don't think that Religious Studies really adds enough intellectual value for me. Christians believe…

Whither the adaptive hypersphere?

No, this should not be in the "Physical Science" category. By hypersphere I'm thinking of the model that R.A. Fisher popularized as opposed to Sewall Wright's conception of the adaptive landscape, a multidimensional sphere within which was located a position which was the adaptive optimum. While Wright's landscapes were rugged, and so opened up the possibility that gene-gene interactions and some level of stochasticity and meta-population dynamics were critical factors in evolution over the long term, Fisher's more symmetrical model focuses on the power of selection operating on loci of…

The Evolution of Avian Clutch Size

tags: evolution, avian clutch size, ornithology, birds, avian The Little Tinamou, Crypturellus soui, usually lays two eggs in a small depression on the forest floor. Image: Cagan Sekercioglu [larger view]. Anyone who has ever watched birds closely or who has bred them in captivity knows that different species of birds have different clutch sizes, with some species laying only one egg while others produce as many as ten eggs per clutch or more. Why is there such a tremendous difference in clutch size? What evolutionary factors affect the average clutch size that each species produces?…