evolution
evolvingthoughts | May 2, 2008
One of the enduring patterns of the history of the history of evolution is for historians to claim that their favourite individual, or their country's best and brightest, invented evolution. The most recent appears to be this guy from New Zealand, claiming that evolution was actually invented by an artist, Augustus Earle, who visited Australia and New Zealand, and spent some time on board the Beagle with Darwin. Earle wrote a book entitled A narrative of a nine months' residence in New Zealand in 1827: together with a journal of a residence in Tristan D'Acunha, an island situated between…
sa smith | May 1, 2008AAAAAARG I am kicking myself for missing this today!
But if you have time tomorrow, there will be live webcasts of the presentations at a conference at Rockefeller University... on 'From RNA to Humans: A Symposium on Evolution'.
AAAAAAAAAH! LOOK AT THIS SCHEDULE!!
Gerald F. Joyce
Jack W. Szostak
Russell F. Doolittle
Roger Buick
Andrew H. Knoll
Someone punch me for missing those talks this morning...
sa smith | May 1, 2008This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that!
I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;)
Last summer, when Behe released his tome-of-TARD 'Edge of Evolution', I had absolutely no intention of reading it. If Dude had anything to say, he would publish it. But I kept hearing from friends that he was saying some crazy stuff about HIV.
He was.
I corrected him.
There is…
gregladen | May 1, 2008A Missouri House Committee has just approved for consideration of the House an Academic Freedom Bill drafted with the aid of the Discovery Institute.
The bill has a nice twist to it in that it prohibits the consideration of any boundary or difference between religion and non-religion in regards to what to teach or how to teach it. In other words, the bill requires that state agencies, school administrators, and teachers ignore the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America in deference to state law. Therefore, challenges to this…
loom | April 30, 2008In my last post I wrote about how scientists are learning about the origin of animals by studying their genomes. One of the surprising findings of the latest research is that a group of animals called comb jellies (ctenophores) belong to the oldest lineage of living animals. Comb jellies look a bit like jellyfish--soft, tentacled creatures without brains or eyes but with a nervous system. As I wrote in the Boston Globe Monday, earlier studies had generally pointed to sponges as belonging to the oldest lineage. If comb jellies take their place, that may mean that the ancestors of sponges lost…
pharyngula | April 30, 2008My last Seed column is online, which reminds me (as if I weren't uncomfortably aware already) that I have to finish up the next one today, which actually isn't the next one, which is already done and submitted, but the one after that. These long leading deadlines force one to live a few months in the future…
You know, if you subscribed to the print magazine, you'd be halfway to my future already instead of living in my distant past.
evolvingthoughts | April 29, 2008
For years people have been telling us the dinosaurs were killed off in an extinction event 65 million years ago. That always seemed a little too even for me. Did they round off, or was there doubt, or what? Now, thanks to a really good piece of detective work reported by Paleoblog, we know it occurred 65.95 million years, give or take 40,000 years, last Thursday.
The authors of the study also date the Chixulub impact that age, reinforcing the theory that the asteroid collision killed them all off, and not volcanic eruptions or anything. Paleoblog also gives the link to the paper.
laelaps | April 29, 2008[Note: Just to put this post in context, today I was feeling extremely frustrated with the seemingly blind acceptance creationism receives because it makes some people feel comfortable. This is surely not my best work, and if anything it represents me trying to sort out the reasons why I keep coming back to the debate even though it can be aggravating at times.]
On a cold Sunday afternoon last February, I sat down to share a few slices of pizza with the man who had invited me to come speak about evolution to the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Morris County, along with my wife and his…
voltagegate | April 29, 2008
If I was given three wishes, I have always said that one of them would be to watch the evolution of life at my leisure, being able speeding things up and slowing them down at will. Of all the time periods we've designated, the Ediacaran and the Cambrian periods would be a frame by frame analysis. Were these organisms really that much different from modern organisms, and if so, did their ecology reflect these differences?
PLoS One published a paper today that attempts to make my pipe dream a reality by taking the well known geological snapshots of Cambrian life, the Chengjiang and Burgess…
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2008Dear Chris,
I don't think for a moment that you (or for that matter, Matt or Sheril) are creationist apologists. But you are successfully pissing off a lot of evolutionary biologists...like me, even though I should be incredibly receptive to your argument.
I've always argued that the creationist controversy is a political, not scientific, controversy. I would go so far as to claim that among the evolutionary biologists I know, I've been one of the staunchest advocates of bare knuckles political responses to creationists (even if those bare knuckles are enclosed in a velvet glove). Likewise…
gregladen | April 29, 2008The Florida House yesterday voted to require teachers to criticize evolution when teaching the subject in Florida public schools. The house version of the bill will now, most likely, travel back to the Senate (where a similar bill, was recently passed). Governor Charlie Crist is not talking about whether or not he will sign the bill.
"What this bill does is tell the teacher, go ahead and teach the theory of evolution and make sure your students have a complete view of that theory and they know that it is only a theory, it is not gospel law," said Rep. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla. "There's no…
pharyngula | April 29, 2008I have to criticize the video below. It's a beautiful piece of work, and the animal it shows is spectacularly well-adapted, but it does not demonstrate the fulfillment of a uniquely Darwinian prediction.
An orchid was found with a nectary that was only accessible by way of a long, narrow tube, and Darwin predicted the existence of an insect pollinator with an almost equivalently long tongue. However, an Owen or a Cuvier, scientists of that century who did not accept evolution, could have easily made the very same prediction, on the basis of created functionality: a god would not have made…
gregladen | April 29, 2008
Second commandment: Try not to be a moron.
(FYI: observed instances of speciation)
Hat Tip: TUIBG and Julia
gregladen | April 28, 2008Food webs --- the network of trophic (eating) interaction among the many species sharing a habitat or biome -- is a much studied aspect of ecology. Food web and other similar phenomena such as dispersal syndromes are epiphenomena of evolution, resulting from the negotiation of competitive and cooperative interactions among many individuals. Indeed, the food web is the gross-level movement of energy within the ebb and flow of entropy and life-based energy capture. This flow of energy is fundamental to all life systems.
The delicacy or vulnerability of a particular habitat ... the potential…
gregladen | April 28, 2008Darwin did a LOT of stuff. It is amazing how often one can trace some basic bit of modern scientific knowledge to an observation or experiment Darwin while travelling on the Beagle, later on in his bathtub, or in his back yard. The NYT has a nice piece on one example of this.
IN 1860, while studying primroses in the garden of Down House, his home in Kent, England, Charles Darwin noticed something odd about their blooms.
While all the flowers had both male and female parts -- anthers and pistils -- in some the anthers were prominent and in others the pistils were longer. So he experimented…
edyong | April 28, 2008
They say that size doesn't matter, but try telling that to bacteria. Most are very small, for they rely heavily on passive diffusion to ferry important nutrients and molecules across their membranes. To ensure that this happens quickly enough, bacteria need to ensure that their surface area is large enough relative to their volume - become too big and they won't be able to import enough nutrients to support their extra size.
These constraints greatly limit the size of bacteria. The larger ones solve the problem by being extremely long and slender, or by using an internal compartment called…
clock | April 28, 2008(First posted on July 21, 2006) Some plants do not want to get eaten. They may grow in places difficult to approach, they may look unappetizing, or they may evolve vile smells. Some have a fuzzy, hairy or sticky surface, others evolve thorns. Animals need to eat those plants to survive and plants need not be eaten by animals to survive, so a co-evolutionary arms-race leads to ever more bizzare adaptations by plants to deter the animals and ever more ingenious adaptations by animals to get around the deterrents.
One of the most efficient ways for a plant to deter a herbivore is to divert…
loom | April 28, 2008Today in the Boston Globe, I write about how scientists are revising their understanding of the evolution of animals, thanks to more DNA and more weird animals. My favorite quote comes from biologist Mark Pallen, who says that the human genome would have been worthless without understanding how humans are related to other animals.
Unfortunately, this research has been subject to some poor reporting, and to some distortions from creationists. Ryan Gregory and Troy Britain set them straight, respectively.
grrlscientist | April 28, 2008tags: Richard Dawkins, Beware the Believers, religious fundamentalism, evolution, streaming video
This amusing streaming video is a rockin' version of Richard Dawkins' expertise [3:57].
gregladen | April 27, 2008With all this talk about Expelled!, the creationist movie, I thought it was about time to resurrect the review I wrote many moons ago of Flock of Dodos by Randy Olson, along with some updated information.
Flock of Dodos is a much better film than Expelled!, and explores the same issue, with somewhat different conclusions. So, for instance, if you are going to use one of them in a school or church to explain the ID/Evolution controversy, I recommend Flock.
(That's a picture of Randy with some big birds at the Tribeca Film Festival.) Plus, since its been out a bit longer, Flock of Dodos is…