evolution
pharyngula | April 21, 2008There in the foaming welter of email constantly flooding my in-box was an actual, real, good, sincere question from someone who didn't understand how chromosome numbers could change over time — and he also asked with enough detail that I could actually see where his thinking was going awry. This is great! How could I not take time to answer?
So here's the question:
How did life evolve from one (I suspect) chromosome to... 64 in horses, or whatever organism you want to pick. How is it possible for a sexually reproducing population of organisms to change chromosome numbers over time?
Firstly:…
cmooney | April 21, 2008...by Greg Laden. Or as one of my own commenters put it, "Either you really are just fucking stupid, or you're a closet creationist in this blog group. Pick one." I won't be deleting that comment despite the profanity, because I want to have it all on the record--the record of what now happens at ScienceBlogs if you say certain thing that people don't want to hear.
All this happened, I suppose, because I dared to point out the obvious: Expelled is a success. I mean, it's the eighth highest grossing political documentary of all time...after its first week. Randy Olson of course knows this,…
evolvingthoughts | April 21, 2008
I just wanted to give you all a heads up to a couple of wonderful blogs:
Tetrapod Zoology's post on the lost lynxes and wildcats of Britain, and Catalogue of Organism's post on spiders that lose their lungs.
It's things like these posts that make me wish I had been a proper biologist,
cmooney | April 20, 2008I merely report the facts: Expelled, opening at over 1,000 theaters this weekend, has raked in $ 3.15 million, placing it ninth at the box office. In terms of political documentaries, it is already the eighth highest grossing of all time.
UPDATE: Randy Olson, with whom I just went to see Expelled here in LA, has more on why this film counts as a major success for the anti-evolution forces.
mikethemadbiologist | April 20, 2008What? You thought I was serious? I'm Mad, not crazy. But the release of Expelled gives me an opportunity to note one facet of creationist stupidity.
A while ago, in response to Michael Egnor, who features prominently in the movie Expelled, I discussed how creationists party like it's 1859. As the movie Expelled inadvertently demonstrates, they fail to recognize that we biologists have done a little work since Darwin's Origin of Species. Specifically, creationists never discuss either population genetics or phylogenetics because, if they did, they would get their asses handed to them (and…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2008
Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein...
And knowing one of the principals in this comment, I had to laugh. When Kimbo says he thinks you are full of shit, he uses those words. I once had him say to me during a Q&A after I gave a talk, "'Fuck you,' he explained." To be fair, I had just told him I thought he was wrong.
So anyone who thinks Intelligent Design has been expelled and they are victims, or that bloggers should be treated with…
loom | April 19, 2008
Click here to watch it on blip.tv (you can even watch in full screen, if you dare...)
evolgen | April 19, 2008It's funny because some people think both groups are wrong:
Originally from Tom the Dancing Bug.
loom | April 18, 2008 NOTE: I'VE SET UP A FLASH VERSION OF THIS TALK HERE. DON'T BOTHER TRYING TO DOWNLOAD THE QUICKTIME VERSION I DESCRIBED IN THIS POST.
Recently I gave the Discovery Lecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, in which I talked about new developments in evolutionary biology. They sent me a DVD of the talk, and I got a lunatic notion in my head that I would figure out how to get all Web Two-Point-O-Ee and post the lecture online. They told me to go ahead as long as I put a watermark on. Ever eager to waste time, I slowly figured out how to do that on QuickTime. Then I uploaded it to blip.tv,…
awild | April 18, 2008Ben Stein's propaganda flick Expelled comes out today. Since other people have hashed the film to death, I won't write about Expelled except to make the following observation.
This is a graph showing the number of technical publications indexed in PubMed under the search terms "evolution" and "intelligent design". I threw in a third search term, "biochemistry", just to give a sense of how evolution sits relative to another large research field. Basically, the graph measures the productivity of a field in terms of scientific publications. In 2007, scientists produced 17 technical…
gregladen | April 18, 2008Good question ... what IS in the air?
The simple answer is that the air ... the Earth's atmosphere ... is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there's dirt. I want to talk a little about the oxygen, one of the other gases (carbon dioxide to be exact), the water vapor, and the dirt.
Oxygen
The oxygen is one of the most important parts to us because we (and all the other animals) need it to breath. To me, what is most interesting about the oxygen is that in the old days ... before any animals or plants evolved but life…
cmooney | April 18, 2008Tonight Larry King will be hosting two celebrity documentarians--Morgan Spurlock (cheers) and Ben Stein (boos). Alas, if the former wanted to be well equipped to debunk the latter's expected tripe about evolution, there probably would have been no better training than making The Republican War on Science as a documentary. But Spurlock opted not to--a decision he recently discussed here in a Q & A. To wit:
Your name has been connected to an adaptation of the book The Republican War on Science? Any news on that project
We bought that book a couple years ago. We optioned the rights to that…
gregladen | April 18, 2008Darrow was born this day in 1857. He was a lawyer and a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
We know him as the defender of John Scopes in the Monkey Trial of 1925. Darrow and Scopes lost that trial, which was the first of many court cases regarding the teaching of creationism vs. evolution in public schools. Virtually all of the subsequent cases were victories for the evolutionists. Indeed, the Monkey Trial was a victory for evolutionists as well, because it is widely recognized that although the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff, Darrow's arguments were…
zooillogix | April 18, 2008Scientists release seemingly harmless Italian Wall Lizards on a deserted South Adriatic island in 1971... and return to find walking, talking, boccie playing super-lizards! That is the headline that would have been written if researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst had waited only a few more years.
In truth however, the scientists discovered that these non-indigenous lizards had undergone remarkable evolutionary changes in only 36 years as they adapted to the new habitat. Duncan Irschick, a biologist from UMass Amherst explained, "Striking differences in head size and shape…
esiegel | April 17, 2008What is the future of this website? I'm going to be creating videos for the web about the Universe. I'll be answering questions ranging from what the Universe is like today to how it got to be that way. I'm going to address every step that we know of, from the Big Bang up to the present day.
And I'm going to do it naturally, by telling the story as the Universe tells it directly to us. I call this project Genesis. Check out the teaser trailer below, and tell your friends, because this is coming in January.
jlynch | April 17, 2008Hofstra University solicits submissions for an interdisciplinary conference titled "Darwin’s Reach: A Celebration of Darwin’s Legacy across Academic Disciplines," to be held March 12-14, 2009.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, paleontologist Niles Eldredge, and Judge John Jones (who wrote the Dover decision on teaching evolution) will be among the keynote speakers.
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…
gregladen | April 17, 2008A huge archive of Darwin's unpublished material has been put on line this week at The Complete Works of Charles Darwin. Many of his notebooks were already on line, but much of that was previously published (so the notes that were on line were actually published. The newly netted material has no previously been available to anyone who did not go to the original archives.
This is the raw stuff, scans of the actual papers.
The main link to access this material is HERE. This is the same site that I have used in my earlier posts on Darwin's writings.
sporte | April 17, 2008In the class that I'm teaching, we found that several PCR products, amplified from the 16S ribosomal RNA genes from bacterial isolates, contain a mixed base in one or more positions.
We picked samples where the mixed bases were located in high quality regions of the sequence (Q >40), and determined that the mixed bases mostly likely come from different ribosomal RNA genes. Many species of bacteria have multiple copies of 16S ribosomal RNA genes and the copies can differ from each other within a single genome and between genomes.
Now, in one of our last projects we are determining where…
evolvingthoughts | April 16, 2008
First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters.
Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no plans have been made to store and make available its collection of type specimens. Why this matters is that the very name of species depend on there being type specimens. Go read Catalogue of Organisms, an amazing blog in any case, on the matter.
sporte | April 16, 2008Ribosomes are molecular machines that build new proteins. This process of synthesizing a protein is also known as translation.
Many antibiotics prevent translation by binding to ribosomal RNA. In the class that I'm teaching, we're going to be looking at ribosome structures to see if the polymorphisms that we find in the sequences of 16S ribosomal RNA are related antibiotic resistance.
This is related to our metagenomics project where we investigate the polymorphisms we find in 16S ribosomal RNAs.
This 6 minute video introduces ribosomes, discusses where they're found, what they're made of,…