Charles Darwin
gregladen | July 26, 2008Amy Binder and John H. Evans, associate professors of Sociology at the University of California at San Diego, have written a piece on efforts to force religion in the guise of Intelligent Design and Creationism down the throats of children in Texas.
A proposal before the Texas Board of Education calls for including the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution in the state's science curriculum. This initiative is understood by supporters and opponents to be a strategic effort to get around First Amendment restrictions on teaching religion in science class. The proposal is a new round in an…
gregladen | July 18, 2008with a little thingie over the 'i' ... which I won't attempt in Movabletype.
George Lemaitre was the priest and scientist who proposed the BIg Bang (though it was not called that then) theory. By the way, for those of you now interested in this discussion of removing the phrase "Darwinism" from our vocabulary, you may find it interesting that "The Big Bang" was originally a non-complementary term used to describe this theory, by its detractors.
Lemaitre prenumberated Hubble's Law, and applied General Relativity to the Universe. He also did important theoretical work work with the atom…
gregladen | July 14, 2008 Darwin and Wallace, chillin' Let's talk about Darwin and Wallace's joint presentation on Natural Selection in 1858.
It is not usually the case that I write a blog post for a carnival. I usually just write for the blog, then now and then sit down and figure out which posts should go to with carnivals. That is not the case with this post.
Some time ago I thought, while writing a Peer Reviewed Research post, that it would be interesting to write up older papers, classics, or more recent papers that were of great interest for one reason or another but maybe a few years old. Just around…
gregladen | July 12, 2008From the NCSE:
Senate Bill 733, signed by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal on June 25, continues to draw criticism from scientists and political observers across the political spectrum.
In the New Scientist, Amanda Gefter reports (July 9, 2008), "The new legislation is the latest manoeuvre in a long-running war to challenge the validity of Darwinian evolution as an accepted scientific fact in American classrooms." Since the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision, where intelligent design creationism was found to be nonscience and unconstitutional to present in science classes, Gefter explains that "…
gregladen | July 10, 2008 Sizzle
Randy Olson is a Harvard ('84) trained marine biologist with field experience on the Great Barrier Reef, in the Antarctic, the US Virgin Islands, and elsewhere. He even spent a little time with Jacques Cousteau.
But an extensive career in marine biology was not to be.
Randy started to change careers around 1990, with the production of a number of short films including "Barnacles Tell No LIes" (which I've placed at the bottom of this post for your enjoyment). In 1994 he literally jumped ship. walking away from a tenured professorship in New Hampshire, and went to USC to study…
gregladen | July 9, 2008Welcome to the One Hundred and Ninth Edition of The Tangled Bank, the Weblog Carnival of Evolutionary Biology. This is the LOL edition of the Tangled Bank....Carnival business ...
The main page for The Tangled Bank is here. The previous edition of The Tangled Bank was here, at Wheatdogg, and the next edition of the Tangled Bank will be here, at Blue Collar Scientist.
And now, on with the show. ...
In Small Things Considered...
Rational redesign of bacterial signaling proteins based on amino acid co-evolution at Chance and Necessity is a bit of Peer Reviewed Research Blogging, covering an…
grrlscientist | July 1, 2008tags: natural selection, evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Darwin Year, Linnean Society of London
Image: Gary Larson.
This morning, I was pleased to hear National Public Radio was celebrating the 150th birthday of Natural Selection, the mechanism whereby evolution occurs.
One hundred and fifty years ago today, two papers were read in front of the Linnean Society of London. One of those papers was written by Alfred Russel Wallace and the other consisted of two excerpts from Charles Darwin's unpublished writings about the origin of species. It turns out that while Wallace…
gregladen | July 1, 2008Natural Selection was proposed jointly by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin on this day 150 years ago.
Darwin discovered the principle of Natural Selection, and worked it out, over several decades prior. Meanwhile A.R. Wallace also came up with Natural Selection as the mechanism for what he was seeing in the wild. Some time in June it became known to Darwin that this guy Wallace as about to roll into town and present his theory. By July 1st, a deal was worked out.
They famously decided to present Wallace's essay (without first asking his permission!), along with two unpublished…
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, 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 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 21, 2008Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference, I'd like to relate at least the essence, as I saw it, of an excellent talk by Mark Borrello.
I've seen Mark speak at least three times including yesterday, and soon after his talk we continued on the topic in a conversation over lunch and beers, so my comments here are less a summary of Mark's talk at the Evolution 2008 conference than a more general reaction to what I believe to be his main points.
Everyone knows that history repeats itself. Or, at least, as per Samuel Clemens, if history does not repeat itself, at least it…
gregladen | June 13, 2008 A very Darwin-like god ponders what the nature of life will be like. From Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. The origin of life presents a number of fundamental difficulties to science. One of these is the seemingly irreducible complexity of life itself. For instance, DNA codes for the molecules that are essential to life. Some of these molecules, however, are the very enzymes that help DNA code for molecules. It is difficult to imagine DNA works without these enzymes, but the enzymes exist in a cell because, in part, of the activities of DNA. Even the basic process of moving…
gregladen | June 11, 2008This just in:
Perhaps he was inspired by the turnout for Young People Fucking, or maybe he misses all that media attention he got after taking credit for getting C-10 through the House with nary a peep over the controversial changes to the film tax rebate. Whatever the reason, Reverend Charles McVety is headed back to the capital to co-host a private screening of a very different kind of film: Expelled: The Movie, the controversial anti-Darwin documentary that purports to expose a sinister anti-creationism bias within the mainstream scientific community.
The details are HERE.
gregladen | June 3, 2008You may have noticed that in my previous post I tried to equivocate and I gave the story right from AP as a big quote. This is because I could not reconcile what I was reading internally. It did not make sense, and I suspected that the press was just trying to bring the campaign to a close. This is based not just on what I posted, but what I watched for 10 minutes on MSBNC.
Turns out my caution was appropriate:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is "absolutely not" planning to concede the campaign to Barack Obama on Tuesday night, Clinton campaign…
gregladen | May 19, 2008A talk by Mark Decker!
May 20, 7 p.m.Bryant-Lake Bowl, Uptown
$5-$10 (pay what you can)
Darwin wrote about the competition between individuals that results in the survival of the fittest. But what about competitions within individuals, between the cells inside our bodies? In that struggle, cancer cells could be considered the most successful since they are the most prolific. Can Darwin provide us with a novel approach to understanding cancer? How might Darwin explain the degenerative diseases of old age? Some biologists suspect that evolution actually favors diseases of old age. In fact, an…
gregladen | May 17, 2008MIT researchers found that phalaropes depend on a surface interaction known as contact angle hysteresis to propel drops of water containing prey upward to their throats. Photo by Robert Lewis The Phalarope starts out as an interesting bird because of its "reversed" sex-role mating behavior. For at least some species of Phalarope, females dominate males, forcing them to build nests and to care for the eggs that the females place there after mating. If a female suspects that a male is caring for eggs of another female, she may destroy the eggs and force the male to copulate with her a few…
gregladen | May 14, 2008The Hofstra University Library, Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Hofstra Cultural Center present a conference:
Darwin's Reach examines the impact of Darwin and Darwinian evolution on science and society in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Robert Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).
The central theme of this academic conference is an exploration of how Darwin's ideas have revolutionized our understanding of both the living world and human nature.
Papers exploring diverse topics on Darwin…
gregladen | May 14, 2008 Emperor Han Aidi Keep an eye on the hanging tree. There will be a fresh astronomer hanging there soon. Mark my words.
This story is sometimes told:
During the reign of a particular emperor in China, the role of the historian was becoming more significant. An historian sat in the Emperors throne room and recorded events, as faithfully as possible, and the Emperor paid close attention to this process.
One day, the Emperor sentenced a man to be beheaded, and the man was executed immediately. However, it was not entirely clear that this was an act of justice or an act of anger. The…
esiegel | May 14, 2008Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God.
Next year, the Vatican is organizing a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Whoa. And whoa's wobbly cousin, woah. Did I just step into the 21st century? After my post last week on what Americans don'…