Search Content

Displaying results 59751 - 59800 of 87947

Standards of proof are pretty low at Fox News

Gah, this is an awful and credulously reported story: Child's Nightmares and Memories Prove Reincarnation. There is no proof there. The story is simple: ordinary child plays video games, draws lots of pictures of airplanes in dogfights and dropping bombs, and has a few night terrors, so the parents leap to the conclusion that he's a reincarnated WWII pilot. When they contact a carrier crewman from the era, he conveniently provides more details to fill in the story, and soon enough, they've got a full blown delusion. My favorite part? The kid is always signing his drawings as "James", and they…

Simple answers to stupid questions (now with bonus answer to bonus question!)

Billy Dembski writes: We are often told that “there is no ID research published in peer reviewed journals“. I receive Nature E-Alerts in a number of biological research fields. Almost every time I read the abstracts and even the titles, or spend more time delving into the detail, I hear “Intelligent Design” silently screamed from the pages. Am I deluded, or do others hear it too? Yes and no, respectively. Bonus stupidity: look at what the Isaac Newton of Information considers evidence of ID. Once he would have claimed you had to calculate something called specified complexity (though he…

Whitewashing wiretapping

As the wiretap bill moves closer to passage it becomes increasingly unclear why any new law is necessary. The new additions to the law make clear that court review of the program would not give blanket authorization for the surveillance, and would require procedures to prevent the surveillance from targetting American citizens without a warrant. The problem is that we have a law that does those things already. FISA provides these same protections, and is less "murky" in the words of former FBI and CIA director William H. Webster, former FBI director William Sessions, and 12 other former…

We've angered another crackpot

Uh-oh. Seed Media has received some demands from Robert Lanza, MD, Scientist, Theoretician, Genius, Renegade Thinker. He wants us to take down a few posts by Orac and myself. I guess he doesn't like being compared to Grandpa Simpson, or seeing disagreement with his ideas about the afterlife, or being exposed as a quantum woo-meister. Gosh, what will I do? Seed has a very clearcut policy on our posts, and there is going to be no attempt to censor any of them. Gee. So I'm not going to edit them. I'd hate to think that anyone might link to this post, or to these presumably objectional posts #1…

Mr. Schwarzenegger goes to Yale

In honor of the centennial anniversary of 1908 Conference of Governors, governors from around the country are going to meet at Yale on April 18 for a conference on global climate change, the group hoping to solidify local and federal initiatives to combat global warming. Among those present will be Jon Corzine (Governor of New Jersey), Chet Culver (Governor of Iowa), Jim Doyle (Governor of Wisconsin), Deval Patrick (Governor of Massachusetts), Jodi Rell (Governor of Connecticut), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Governor of California), and Kathleen Sebelius (Governor of Kansas). More information can…

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the blogosphere...

I have little sympathy for human-like "dinosauroids," but apparently they're more popular than even I originally thought. Darren, master of "things that make you go 'Huh?!', has a summary of some "anthroposaurus"-related literature, including details of the nuclear Cretaceous apocalypse. The latest edition of the Accretionary Wedge is now up, featuring plenty of excellent posts about geology in the movies. Pop some corn and check it out. The way our species gives birth is a bit frightening in itself, but I have to say I am glad that human babies aren't born like this.…

Smilodon vs. Backhoe

There must be some unwritten rule that if you're going to face off against a prehistoric predator, you'd better make sure there's some heavy machinery nearby to even the odds [from an episode of Primeval]; The first time such a confrontation between "monster" and machine on film (that I know of, anyway) was in the film Dinosaurus!; More recently the low-budget gore-fest Carnosaur pulled the same trick; Of course, nothing says cheesy b-movie like recycling action sequences; Carnosaur 2 rehashed the climax of the first film using a forklift (Beware: Clip contains gratuitous gore near…

Egregious comma abuse

We're about to leave lovely Vancouver to return to Kent, Washington, so must leave you with something awful to chew on for a while. This is is a beautiful example of why creationists can be so stupid: spelling and grammar errors throughout, misrepresentations of the actual science, and non-stop idiocy. For instance, it is not true that squid, octopus, and cuttlefish have all been found in the Cambrian; the coleoids diverged from a common ancestor in the late Cambrian or early Ordovician. This does not mean that modern coleoids were present in the Cambrian. We've got a pretty good idea of what…

Cobra Wrestling

A pair of male cobras grapple with each other in a clip from Life in Cold Blood; Oddly enough, I was just thinking about dominance contests between males and various armaments this morning. Although violence is a part of nature, there are many species in which males compete for territories or mate access that have evolved traits or behaviors to minimize risk in such contests (elongated canines, like among the dinocerata, and the horns of kudu were what primarily occupied my thoughts this morning). Mating systems and systems of male competition may vary widely, though, and as strange as it…

Photo of the Day #93: Female Gorilla

While the mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei)studied by Diane Fossey might be the most familiar to the public, the vast majority of living gorillas are Western (or lowland) gorillas, Gorilla gorilla. While myths about these animals had circulated for some time, they were officially named in 1847 (the mountain species not being named until 1903), but of the two gorilla species they are generally less studied. Western gorillas differ from mountain gorillas in that they eat much more fruit and are more arboreal, and some populations have been observed to use tools (the elusive Cross River…

Sport Science FTW!

Normally, it isn't really news when a show doesn't do anything wrong. I am making an exception for ESPN's Sport Science. Here is part 2 of Sport Science trying to reproduce Kobe Bryant's "jumping over a car" stunt. And here is part 1 (although part 2 is the only interesting part). See. I can get along with Sport Science. Anyway, I am not sure that Kobe's jump used wires - but I assumed it was fake. Here is my analysis of Kobe's Jump (this stuff is old). And this is the plot I created from video analysis of Kobe. The tough thing about looking at Kobe's jump is that he changes his body…

Self-preservation

Todd Tiahrt, Republican congressman from Wichita, is worried. In the course of a heated debate, he told his colleagues on the House floor "If you have a single ounce of self-preservation, you'll vote no." What, you might ask, is so crucial to their survival? Is this more heated rhetoric over FISA? Funding for the war on brown people terror? No, an ethics bill, creating a bipartisan panel to investigate ethics complaints against congresscritters. This is what Tiahrt sees as a profound existential crisis. Says something, doesn't it? Tiahrt's power over the Kansas 4th district is being…

Thanks

While I'll be doling out particular thanks to individuals today, I want to take a moment while the turkey roasts to thank you, dear readers. When I started this blog, it was basically a way to stop clogging the email boxes of family and friends with my frustration at political events in the world. Pretty soon, you all came along, and so did the peculiar focus and voice that TfK has today. It's been a crazy 3 years, and I look forward to many more. Thanks to this blog, and to you readers, I was able to see and to follow a career path I never would have imagined. The free books and…

Baby rhino born at Sedgwick County (Wichita) Zoo

The Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita announced the birth of a 60 pound baby girl rhino. She will be named by the winner of an auction in September. The unnamed rhino was born to Bibi, the second Eastern Black Rhinoceros in the US obtained from a Japanese zoo. A survey in 2001 found fewer than 500 of the subspecies in the wild. Their populations are threatened mainly by poachers, who sell their horns in the Middle East and Asia. Their phallic shape of the horns, which can reach over four feet long, causes people to treat them as aphrodisiacs or signs of virility. Trade in rhinos is…

Force Rocket Game Level 2

Popular demand (from a few people - you know who you are) requested another level for the force game. I am open to naming this game. Ideas for levels have been suggested also. There is a new rule change. You must be stopped (or almost stopped) in the red circle. Learn more about this project Update: I guess I didn't include instructions on how to play the game. Just click on the applet window to make sure it is active. Press the space bar to start the game. Once the game starts the objective is to use rocket thrusters (the arrow keys) to move the rocket (the black rectangle) into the…

Comic-con gets a new attraction

This is going to be hilarious: Comic-con is next week in San Diego, and the professional attention whores at Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church are going to picket it. The destruction of this nation is imminent — so start calling on Batman and Superman now, see if they can pull you from the mess that you have created with all your silly idolatry. I don't know why they've chosen Comic-con; maybe it's because the attendees are mostly able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, a grave sin to Phelps. You know what would be really funny? Fred Phelps reading the Sunday funny pages…

Epigraph

Via Brad Delong, an epigraph I may have to use in my dissertation: The time has come, [my] doctrines have been verified, the sufferings [of the people] have taken place; and, therefore, here is the book. The scoffings, the scornings, the abuse, the reviling, the horrible calumnies and the base persecutions which this book and other efforts of a similar kind brought upon me, and the briefest notice of each instance of which would fill fifty volumes more bulky than this, are now amply avenged by the joy that I feel at that which I know behold, and which can no longer be hidden from even the…

Advanced Nature Study (now with splicing!)

Younger offspring did not, to my knowledge, watch of listen to the State of the Union address wherein President Bush called for legislation prohibiting the creation of human-animal hybrids. Indeed, it's not even clear that this wee beastie has any human DNA in it. (With recessive traits, it can be hard to tell.) Yet it's hard not to think this specimen is treading on ethically dangerous ground: Younger offspring's explanation of this image, plus an image from Elder offspring that calls out for your interpretation, below the fold. According to younger offspring: It's part cow and part…

"Please excuse this blogger's absence." (a note in haiku)

I have not been well. Indeed, I had a few days where I was not fully convinced of my own humanity. (Also, I was having febrile "dreams" in HTML.) I think I'm on the mend. However, I seem to be unable to crank out an actual blog entry. Rather, I'm coughing up language in 17 syllable chunks. The course of my illness after the jump. Just in case I'm still contagious, don't lick your keyboard. Started like a cold Tickling trickle of mucous Concrete in my throat. Soreness in my joints Fatigue grinding heavily Knocks me off my feet. Fever sets up shop Brain strains to find coherence Worn out…

Tooth Decay and Drugs

No, I'm not talking crystal meth, and that much hyped syndrome, methmouth. I'm talking about your cholesterol medication, or your blood pressure pills, or your Prozac. From Steven Dubner: Dr. Reiss [Dubner's dentist] told me that tooth decay in general, even among wealthy patients, is getting worse and worse, particularly for people in middle age and above. The reason? An increased reliance on medications for heart disease, high cholesterol, depression, etc. Many of these medications, Dr. Reiss explained, produces drymouth, which is caused by a constricted salivary flow; because saliva kills…

Where does your gas come from?

Although it wasn't supposed to be possible, Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek managed to trace the gallons of gas he purchased from a local gas station back to its varied origins. He ended up traveling to the Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria, Irag and Venezuela. Along the way we meet gas station managers in Illinois making the minimum wage, crazy Marxist oil workers in Venezuela, frightened oil security guards in Iraq, and oil geologists desperately trying to discover new sources of black gold. As Salopnek writes, his journey around the world "is, in effect, a journey into the heart of America's…

False Memory

One of the delicious ironies of memory is that, even when our recollections are utterly false, they still feel true. Consider this wonderful tale from the upcoming season of This American Life (I've loved the first two episodes, by the way): Or as Proust put it: "How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory...The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years." That bleak view of memory jives with lots of recent work looking at the cellular reconsolidation of…

The Bible Belt can never improve if everyone refuses to question religion

This is appalling. This video of a supposedly secular high school biology classroom will show you what we're up against. These students are simply expressing uninformed incredulity — they can't imagine how anything could have evolved. And the incompetent apologist of a teacher, who is sympathetic to creationism himself, isn't doing his job, which is to explain to them exactly how biology explains these phenomena. Instead, he makes excuses: "How could I say to a student, 'your ideas are trash'?" It's not hard. One student at the end says this: How can like an African-American person evolve…

Teaching the Tongue to See

It's an audacious idea, and I didn't believe it was possible until I saw the video. But it really is possible to teach blind people to see using their tongue. By connecting a camera to an array of electrodes that stimulate the sensitive nerves inside the mouth - a pixel of light is translated into a slight pinch - scientists can literally retrain the brain. Check out the video: This might seem like an impossible example of sensory plasticity, but it's been done before. The neuroscientist Mriganka Sur, for example, literally re-wired the mind of a ferret, so that the information from its…

Nosocomial Infections: Do You Really Want the Lawyers Involved?

Because that's what it will come to if the medical establishment fails to confront the hospital-acquired infection problem head on. In 2004, 90,000 in the U.S. died from hospital-acquired infections, and two million had a hospital-acquired infection--and in my opinion, those are conservative estimates (the reporting issues are very complex, but the short version is that many infections are simply never reported). At some point, a clever class-action attorney is going to figure this out, and then everything will go sideways. You do not want the courts creating public health policy (they did…

Mystery Volcano Photo #9: San Miguel, El Salvador

It took a few more guesses than some, but Boris Behncke correctly identified MVP#9 as San Miguel in El Salvador. The current MVP standings: volcanista - 1 Elizabeth - 1 Ralph - 1 gijs - 1 Anne - 1 Cam - 1 gg - 1 The Bobs - 1 Boris Behncke - 1 Still no repeat winners, making for a crowded platform at the top. San Miguel in El Salvador, photographed from the ISS. As for our MVP, San Miguel is one of the most active volcanoes in El Salvador. It has had half a dozen eruptions over the last 25 years, most recent producing a small (VEI 1) explosive eruption in 2002. Most eruptions fall into the…

Cleveland erupts!

And not because the Indians' season is finally (mercifully) over (zing!) Cleveland steaming away in a 2008 AVO image. Cleveland (the volcano) erupted on Friday, producing an ash column that reached 4.5-6 km / 15,000-20,000 feet. The full report from AVO: Satellite data indicate that Cleveland volcano erupted briefly this morning at ~0730 UTC (2330 AKDT) 02 October 2009, producing a small, detached ash cloud that drifted northeast of the volcano at maximum altitudes of 15,000' to 20,000' (4.5 - 6.1 km) . AVO has no real data seismic data right now for Cleveland, so only satellite imagery…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 8/19-25/2009

The slow summer for volcanic eruptions continue. Only 11 updates in this week's USGS/SI report. Thanks again to SI's Sally Kuhn Sennert for compiling the news! Highlights this week include (not including Kilauea) include: Tungurahua in Ecuador produced some minor lahars on August 21 to go with steam-and-gas emissions. Popocatépetl in Mexico produced an ash plume that reached ~8.2 km / 27,000 feet on August 20 and continued to produce steam-and-ash plumes throughout the week following. Over on the Kamchatka Peninsula, both Koryaksky and Shiveluch produced significant ash plumes (reaching 3-5…

Eruption occuring on Venus?

Quick hit post from beautiful Walnut, Iowa, but this was too interesting to pass up... Bright plume spotted on Venus, image taken by the ESA Venus Express. Did a volcanic eruption recently occur on Venus? No one really knows, but a bright plume of unknown material was spotted by an amateur astronomer. One possible source for this plume might be a volcanic eruption. In the first articles, it was dismissed by "experts" because it is believed that Venus mostly has effusive (lava flow) eruptions not explosive eruptions that form big ash-laden plumes. However, basaltic eruptions on Earth (as it…

Chaiten Eruption Update 2

Update 5/4/08: Looks like there is now officially a deathtoll for Chaiten, as an elderly woman died during the evacuations. The volcanoes continues to spew ash and I wouldn't be surprised if it did so for at least a few more days. There have also been reports of a sharp increase in earthquakes in the area since the eruption. Now, before everyone goes nuts, this could be just a response to the dramatic release of pressure caused by the eruption, possibly faulting in the caldera walls activated by the eruption, or possibly magma working its way to the surface as the eruption progresses.…

If the Shroud of Turin is what it is claimed to be, then…

Uh-oh. Gregory Paul has analyzed the proportions of the image on the Shroud of Turin, and come to some troubling conclusions. This note is intended to describe why, from an artistic and anatomical perspective, the shroud image is an embarrassingly obvious fraud committed by a Gothic artist following the standard conventions of his time. The artistic errors are so severe that it is impossible for the shroud to record the image of an actual human body--unless it was a very seriously pathological person with a brain the size of a Homo erectus. So Jesus was a hypocephalic cretin? You know, this…

Highlights from TIMSS 2007 at AAAS

I'm getting ready for a session at AAAS where researchers will explore the results of the multi-national TIMSS study of science knowledge by 4th and 8th graders. They'll be comparing different US state results to draw lessons for improving science education, looking at Massachusetts and Minnesota's dramatic improvements on these tests from 2005 to 2007. The room is fairly empty, and an audience member suggests that they'd get a better crowd at the science teachers' meetings in Philadelphia this summer. A session organizer replies, "The people who should be here, aren't." A message in lots…

Tiny Tyrannosaurus rex

Tyrannosaurid Skeletal Design First Evolved at Small Body Size: Tyrannosaurid dinosaurs comprised nearly all large-bodied predators (>2.5 tons) on northern continents during the Late Cretaceous. We show that their most conspicuous functional specializations--a proportionately large skull, incisiform premaxillary teeth, expanded jaw-closing musculature, diminutive forelimb, and a hindlimb with cursorial proportions--were present in a new small-bodied, basal tyrannosauroid from Lower Cretaceous rocks in northeastern China. These specializations, scaled up in Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurids…

The dog as rat

Speaking of Richard Dawkins, he's back to science, in this case an excerpt from his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution: The evolution of the dog, then, if Coppinger is right, was not just a matter of artificial selection, but a complicated mixture of natural selection (which predominated in the early stages of domestication) and artificial selection (which came to the fore more recently). The transition would have been seamless, which again goes to emphasise the similarity -- as Darwin recognised -- between artificial and natural selection. Nothing new in the…

M$'s IBM moment?

Anil Dash has an essay up, Google's Microsoft Moment, (H/T, Charles Iliya Krempeaux) which will be roughly correct at some point in the future if not now. Organizations go through changes in a predictable manner, and Google is unlikely to defy the inevitable laws of corporate evolution. On a related note, Bing Delivers Credibility to Microsoft. Bing is OK, but I wonder how much of the relative openness to it is conditional upon the reality that Microsoft's star is in relative decline in the firmament of technology companies, and so there isn't a reflexive hostility engendered by genuine fear…

Michael Jackson: the king is dead

I was out and about doing errands when a friend called me to tell me that Michael Jackson had died. My first reaction was to utter an expletive. I wasn't sad, I didn't think this was a false report. I didn't know how to react. It's as if a friend calls you and tells you that the Rocky Mountains had disappeared. The very configuration of the pop culture firmament has shifted before our very eyes. Jackson's music career had long waned in the United States, for most of my lifetime he'd been more of a cultural than musical phenomenon. I didn't think of Michael Jackson very often, but I always…

Pray the virus away

Carl Zimmer points out that Marianne Williamson is making some real strange suggestions in regards to the swine flue in The Huffington Post: l) Pray it away. Just pray it away, asking God as you understand Him, the Divine Physician, Jesus or whatever other form of divine imagery works for you. Simply ask that it be removed from our midst. 2) Send love to Mexico. Between what's actually been happening there with the drug wars, plus all the "Mexico is dangerous" thoughts we've loaded onto it over the last several weeks, it needs a major dose of love - the most powerful medicine of all - to…

Signals of recent positive selection, words vs. figures

Dan MacArthur already posted some of the supplementary figures from Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations, but he didn't put up one that I thought was really striking. The text: First, there is extensive sharing of extreme iHS and XP-EHH signals between Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, while overlap between other regions is much more limited. In fact, 44% of the genomic segments in the 1% tail of iHS in Europe fall in the 5% tail for both the Middle East and Central Asia (89% are shared between Europe and at least one of these two), while…

War Machines

This bloggingheads.tv about war robots is pretty fascinating. One of the issues with robots is that people are fixated on androids and really human-like artifice, and that hasn't really panned out. But it seems that technology is becoming a seamless part of our lives in a way that we're not even particularly aware of. The new shuffle isn't just a technology story, it's a lifestyle & fashion story. I'm very interested near the end when Peter Singer recounts how someone with a chip implant began to consider un-augmented humans "cows." I'm moderately skeptical of extrapolating from this…

Evolutionary landscapes

Mark Chu-Carroll has a "must read" post, Fitness Landscapes, Evolution, and Smuggling Information: If you look at the evolutionary process, it's most like the iterative search process described towards the beginning of this post. The "search function" isn't really static over time; it's constantly changing. At any point in time, you can loosely think of the search function for a given species as exploring some set of mutations, and selecting the ones that allow them to survive. After a step, you've got a new population, which is going to have new mutations to explore. So the search function…

Paul Bloom on "Free Will"

Of all the bloggingheads.tv "regulars" I enjoy Will Wilkinson's "Free Will" the most, probably because of an intersection of our interests and general outlooks (though Will is far more liberal than I am). Though the headline for this week's episode has to do with atheism, the really interesting part of this interview with Paul Bloom is the second half. By the end of the diavlog Will admits that he aspires toward being a traitor to the United States, and that he isn't too inclined to engage in a cannibal feast where his grandmother is the main course due to her lack of attraction to his…

Do We Really Suck This Bad at Making Things?

There are two recent and very disheartening stories about energy technology. The first has to do with the new standards for automobile gas mileage in the U.S.: The proposal, which would require automakers to achieve 35 miles per gallon on average, is similar to a measure that was passed in the summer by the Senate but was bitterly opposed by the auto companies, who argued they did not have the technology or the financial resources to reach that goal. The auto companies gave up their long-held opposition to fuel- economy increases not long before the Senate version was passed, but proposed a…

A contest gets a winner: common creationist claims refuted

Once upon a time, in vague exasperation at a persistent creationist, I opened up two of his questions to the Pharynguloid horde in a contest to see who could answer them most clearly and succinctly. I shouldn't have done this; I'm lazy, and this was too much like grading term papers. Still, there were a lot of good answers, so it was a worthwhile effort. The winner, judged for clarity, brevity, and accuracy, was Calilasseia, an infrequent commenter here who clearly needs to increase his or her frequency. I've sent off an email in hopes of a reply with a mail address, or if Calilasseia notices…

The Original Sin of the 'Christian Right': Segregation

In all the recounting of Jerry Falwell's life, almost all of the focus has been on Falwell's 'religiously' motivated positions. But this ignores Falwell's first political activity: to defend the system of American apartheid known as segregation. Racism, not abortion or other 'religious' issues, was what gave rise to the 'religious' right. Max Blumenthal reminds us of this: Indeed, it was race-not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues-that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.... Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights…

Two Reasons to Blog Anonymously

I've never really considered myself an anonymous blogger, even though I blog under the pseudonym "Mike the Mad Biologist." I think about fifteen minutes of serious investigation would reveal my identity (nefarious as it is). It's more of a minor affectation than anything else. But two incidents in the past week illustrate why not having your name directly linked with criticism of Little Lord Pontchartrain might be a good thing. First, via cookie jill, is this story about an anti-war activist trying to get a passport: A local activist thinks the federal government is trying to prevent him…

Religion in China

Pew has an excellent survey up about the state of religion and religiosity in China. There isn't a lot of good data out of China on this topic for obvious reasons. One of the phenomenon of recent years in the West has been the perception among evangelicals that China is the scene of mass conversions to Christianity. Because of the lack of data there are speculations of hundreds of millions of crypto-Christians; and some in the media repeat these claims rather uncritically (Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power is an example of the…

Meet the New New Math, Same As the Old New Math? What We Can Learn from Finland

Recently, The New York Times published an op-ed calling for curricular changes in K-12 math education: Today, American high schools offer a sequence of algebra, geometry, more algebra, pre-calculus and calculus (or a "reform" version in which these topics are interwoven). This has been codified by the Common Core State Standards, recently adopted by more than 40 states. This highly abstract curriculum is simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life. For instance, how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic…

Sunday Sermon: The Canard of Insolvency and the Bankruptcy of Leadership

Bill Mitchell smacks down some silliness from Peggy Noonan about the supposed looming insolvency of the U.S. (italics mine): She [Noonan] should hang her head in shame for providing further myths that will certainly agitate all the ignorant - uneducated (despite long lists of credentials) - and high blood pressure conservative types who get wound up every day about their claims the US is facing impending bankruptcy. Leave them alone Peggy. Let them have a day off so they can calm down. What does being bankrupt or almost bankrupt - on paper or anywhere else mean when you are talking about a…

Cultural vs. genetic "group selection"

I have often said that I tend to see "group selection" as a lesser evolutionary force when set against lower levels of evolutionary processes, e.g., "individual" or "gene" level selection. By group selection I do not mean pro-social tendencies, or the success of individuals who band together as a group, but rather evolutionary processes which can not be reduced down to a lower level of selection. In other words, evolution is acting directly upon the group as an emergent property of a collection of individuals. My skepticism toward groups selection is conventional and orthodox: evolutionary…

Stochastic training wheels

The idea of stochastic training wheels sounds a bit scary, but I am alluding to the series of posts on stochastic dynamics adapted from chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies by John Gillespie. Using Gillespie's terminology the posts were: Boundary Process Origination Process Genetic Drift Genetic Draft Random Environment There was also another factor which Gillespie points to, which didn't have a particular section and rather loomed over all the other parameters, and that was Deterministic Selection. Of Gillespie's parameters only one is highly dependent on the…