evolution
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2008
In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic comment.
First of all, some of my commenters think that this doesn't rule out religion being the threat. It may still be the major source of illiberalism, and I cannot deny that, but I think the problem lies not in the instantiation of the antimodernism, but in the psychology that underlies it. For religious ideas would have no issue if they did not…
gregladen | April 27, 2008Some of my colleagues are downplaying the recent paper in science showing a: that mastodons are elephants and b: that birds and dinosaurs ... in particular Tyrannosaurus rex and turkeys ... are related. (See here and here, for instance)
Yes, it is true that these phylogenetic findings are wholly uninteresting, being exactly what we expected. But that is WHY these particular phylogenies were carried out.
You see, the research is being done with organic material that is very very old, and is amazingly, remarkably, unexpectedly and astoundingly preserved. The point of using this material to…
hrynyshyn | April 26, 2008I nominate this review of Expelled as the best yet. It's by Ken Hanke, film critic of the Asheville Mountain X Press, the alternative weekly in western North Carolina. The summary is priceless ;;;;; "An interminable, shockingly bad and completely irresponsible slab of propaganda masquerading as fact." And the review is full of gems like:
Junk science meets even junkier filmmaking in Nathan Frankowski's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed--a no more shameless, stupid and loathsome piece of propaganda has ever skulked its way into the theater.
...
The reality is that the film is as phony as Stein…
pharyngula | April 26, 2008Maybe you think it's spring — I don't, I just looked out through ice-glazed windows at half a foot of new snow — and you're thinking about the garden. Here's an idea: you don't need to take a trip to the Galapagos to study evolution, you can do it right in your backyard. The New York Botanical Garden is opening a new exhibit, called Darwin's Garden.
In all, the tour is 33 stops, spread throughout about half of the garden's 250 acres. Visitors who enter the exhibition through the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory will encounter a replica of a room in Darwin's house, designed so they can look through…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, dinosaurs, birds, Tyrannosaurus rex, ornithology, paleontology
The Tyrannosaurus rex femur from which researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University recovered soft tissue.
Image: Science.
It wasn't too long ago that paleontologists thought that fossilization was a process where all biological material was replaced with inert stone. However, in 2005, Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University rocked the paleontological world when she recovered a still-elastic blood vessel from inside a fractured thigh bone fossil of…
gregladen | April 25, 2008
"Teaching Creationism in Schools," the second in a series of videos produced by NCSE, debuted at expelledexposed.com on April 23, 2008. The brief video presents three incidents in which NCSE helped concerned citizens to resist assaults on the integrity of evolution education. In the video, NCSE's Eugenie C. Scott explains: "If we're going to have good science education, now and in the future, we have to support people like Erec [Hillis], people like the citizens of Dover, and people like the citizens in Kansas, and we have to put out those brushfires. And NCSE is going to be there until…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2008tags: Creationism-vs-evolution, fundamentalism, religion, culture wars
A friend, Dave, sent me an interesting article that was published several months ago in Science. This insightful and well-written article by Jennifer Couzin is important because it focuses on one scientist's trauma and ensuing lifelong journey with rejecting his evangelical creationist upbringing to accept evolution as scientific fact. Below the fold is a summary of this article for you to read.
Paleontologist Stephen Godfrey, curator of the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland, started out his life incongruously as…
laelaps | April 25, 2008Yesterday a short notice was printed in the journal Science describing where Tyrannosaurus fell in relation to birds on the basis of molecular evidence (i.e. proteins recovered from a Tyrannosaurus femur). Surprise, surprise, the study found that Tyrannosaurus is more closely related to birds than the American alligator or the green anole lizard. Not everything came out perfectly, however. The phylogenetic tree created by the molecular data but Tyrannosaurus in the same group as the birds, meaning that (in the words of the authors) it "leaves Dinosauria unresolved."
An even more obvious error…
mikethemadbiologist | April 24, 2008An outbreak of vancomycin resistant MRSA, or VMRSA, would be the 'perfect microbiological storm', even worse than vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA). The only currently available antibiotics that would be effective against it would have to be used off-label, and are not very effective against sepsis (bloodstream) infections. Fortunately, VRSA is observed only anecdotally: a single patient, usually on long-term vancomycin therapy, is infected with it, and it is not spread to other patients or healthy people.
One reason is that most patients with VRSA are already in hospitals…
oracknows | April 24, 2008Yesterday, I did a rather long post that used as its introduction an assertion by bioethicist Arthur Caplan in a review of the anti-evolution propaganda movie Expelled! that the claim that Darwinism led more or less directly to the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial. In my post, I concluded that I don't agree with that assertion and that likening Ben Stein's claims in the movie actually weakened his otherwise excellent article that appropriately pointed out the inherent immorality and dishonesty in the way the movie links Darwinism to the Holocaust. To my surprise, Dr. Caplan actually…
grrlscientist | April 23, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, speciation, Pod Mrcaru lizard, Podarcis sicula, reptiles
Pod Mrcaru lizard, Podarcis sicula.
Image: Anthony Herrel (University of Antwerp) [larger view]
Evolution has long been thought to occur slowly, due to small and gradual genetic changes that accumulate over millions of years until eventually, a new species arises. However, recent research has been calling this assumption into question. According to a study that was just published by an international team of scientists, dramatic physical changes can occur very rapidly -- on the order of just 30…
cmooney | April 23, 2008It has just gone up over at Science Progress. Since there are certain things you cannot really say on ScienceBlogs any longer, I will only quote here the parts of the review that are ideologically palatable:
Okay, let's get this out of the way first: Ben Stein's new movie, Expelled, is a deeply dishonest piece of propaganda. Pretty much everything in it is a sham, from the quality of its intellectual and scientific arguments to the nonsense premise that Stein is going on a learning odyssey to find out what's really happening in the world of "Big Science" (hint: repression of dissent). In…
pharyngula | April 23, 2008
The title gets the principal objection of any creationist out of the way: yes, this population of Podarcis sicula is still made up of lizards, but they're a different kind of lizard now. Evolution works.
Here's the story: in 1971, scientists started an experiment. They took 5 male lizards and 5 female lizards of the species Podarcis sicula from a tiny Adriatic island called Pod Kopiste, 0.09km2, and they placed them on an even tinier island, Pod Mrcaru, 0.03km2, which was also inhabited by another lizard species, Podarcis melisellensis. Then a war broke out, the Croatian War of Independence…
gregladen | April 23, 2008Despite the fact that the producers of Expelled! have the most nefarious of motives in mind, and that we can expect more from them (we are waiting for the other shoe to drop), it is interesting to note how many conversations this documentary about Intelligent Design Creationism has sparked. Ultimately, the intended purpose of Expelled! is to silence real scientists and set back scientific research that is on the verge of filling one of the most important "gaps" in which the Christian God of the theistic evolutionist currently lives. In the long run, conversations that arise from movies like…
oracknows | April 23, 2008I knew there was a reason why I like bioethicist Art Caplan.
Leave it to him not to be afraid not only to wander a bit afield of medicine than usual but also to call it as he sees it, mainly his argument for why Expelled! and its claim that "Darwinism" led directly to the Holocaust is not only historically incorrect but a form of Holocaust denial. I don't quite agree with him, but he makes a compelling argument:
The movie seeks to explain why, as a matter of freedom of speech, intelligent design should be taught in America's science classrooms and presented in America's publicly funded…
gregladen | April 22, 2008Now that Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed, the movie, exists, we wait not so quietly for the other shoe to drop. I'll tell you in a moment what that other shoe is going to look like and where it is going to drop. First I want to make a couple of topically linked but otherwise discombobulated comments.
First, I want to express my heartfelt warm fuzzies for all those of you who have come out to tell me "Yes, Greg, you are an asshole, but that's OK. In fact, it's what we love about you" and shit. Appreciate it.
Second, you did notice that the take for Expelled! fell short of the expected…
gregladen | April 22, 2008Chris Mooney has made an "appeal to authority" (Randy Olson) in asserting that Expelled is a success by Hollywood standards, and this may be correct. PZ Myers and his comet tail may have increased that success as per Mooney's Framing TOE, but the reverse is also true: the science blogging share of the blogosphere has expanded and participation in that community has significantly increased. Oh, and nobody understands me.
What Chris actually does is to cite Olson, who in turn makes the argument. One could ask why Chris did not make the argument himself because the argument should stand on…
laelaps | April 22, 2008
Although not as aquatically-adapted as their distant ancestors, Indian elephants are certainly capable swimmers.
A number of my fellow ScienceBloggers have covered the "Aquatic Elephant Hypothesis" lately (see here, here, and here), and even though I'm a little late to the party I thought that I'd throw in my two cents about the significance of ancient, waterlogged pachyderms.
The idea that the ancestors of elephants (including the two living genera Loxodonta and Elephas) were aquatic at some point in the past has been circulating for a number of years now, especially given the close…
voltagegate | April 21, 2008A comparison of carbon/oxygen isotope ratios from the tooth enamel of two early proboscideans, Moeritherium and Barytherium to other animals of the same era (circa 37 mya) revealed to researchers the possibility of a ancient, semi-aquatic animal, linking the speculated split of dugong and elephant from a common ancestor. "The scientists" (as the article begins; that's some lead) said that they have:
...substantial evidence to suggest that modern elephants do have ancient relatives which lived primarily in water. The next steps are to conduct similar analyses on other elephant ancestors to…
cmooney | April 21, 2008This is not to knock the very important Expelled Exposed website. But in my opinion, in this day and age you really have to answer film with more film--and entertaining film with more entertaining film.
Ben Stein is very intellectually dishonest in Expelled, but he's also funny. Luckily, Randy Olson's 2006 documentary Flock of Dodos is also funny--and charming, and humane. So for people who might want to learn about evolution and actually be entertained at the same time, it seems to me the best answer that we currently have to Expelled. My advice would be to go buy a lot of DVD copies, and…