evolution
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2008
While we're on the topic of animals that act like humans, consider this very sad, very famous case: Nim Chimpsky. Raised to be a human boy, when the funds ran out and Nim got to the age equivalent of a five year old boy, he was sent off to live with other chimps. Imagine that you are a five year old boy and get put into a cage with chimps...
And despite Nim's handlers' published opinion, it seems he did use ASL for communication, as have other chimps more humanely looked after.
mikethemadbiologist | March 31, 2008In my entire tenure at ScienceBlogs, I've never called out other ScienceBloglings, even if I have posted responses to them. But ScienceBloglings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet are slowly morphing into unwitting concern trolls regarding the creationist controversy.
With regards to Richard Dawkins, as I've said before, I think he's a wash. On the one hand, he seems utterly ignorant of the U.S. political landscape (or worse, he just doesn't care) when fighting what is a political battle (the creationist controversy). On the other hand, he makes people like me who are not Christian and who do…
razib | March 30, 2008I have a review copy of Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence; but I'm not planning on reading it at this point. See John Hawks for why. Sometimes interdisciplinary work sheds new light on old questions because of the ability to think-outside-of-the-box. Sometimes not so much.
mikethemadbiologist | March 30, 2008A while back, when Michael Egnor was prattling on about evolution and antibiotic resistance, I described how Egnor didn't comprehend the difference between artificial selection and natural selection. In a related post, ScienceBlogling PZ, in debunking the 'TEH DARWINISMZ KREATED HITLER!!' canard, puts Darwin's seminal contribution in context:
There is a central, incredibly obvious fact in Darwin's insight.
If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations.
It isn't razzle-dazzle genius. Any idiot can figure that one out--and many…
laelaps | March 29, 2008Sometimes textbook cardboard refuses to disintegrate. According to scientific lore, T.H. Huxley singlehandedly slew Samuel "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce during a debate at Oxford in the sweltering heat of an 1860 summer, causing a woman to faint and sending Robert Fitzroy, (former captain of the HMS Beagle when it took Charles Darwin around the world) into a frenzy, stalking the aisles and shouting "The book! The book!" while holding a bible aloft. It's a nice story, but like many such tales, it's probably not true.
Although the legend of Huxley's great victory over Wilberforce continues to this…
oracknows | March 29, 2008Hilarious, particularly "big-pimpin'" Daddy Dennett:
I can't make up my mind if it's meant to skewer Dawkins or whether it's meant ironically as a way of making fun of ID creationists and how they view Dawkins...
oracknows | March 29, 2008Nasal drone Ben Stein, as you would be hard-pressed not to know if you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs, is hosting what looks to be a truly execrable crap-fest called Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie basically consists of two themes: (1) Whining about "intellectual oppression" by those evil "Darwinists" directed against any valiant "intelligent design" creationist or anyone else who "questions" Darwin and (2) lots of blaming the Holocaust and other atrocities (but mainly Hitler and the Holocaust) on "Darwinism," replete with lots of shots of Nazis, Ben Stein clumsily emoting…
jrosenhouse | March 28, 2008Christianity Today has now published a review of Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution. You might dimly recall this book, since it was briefly big news among the ID folks upon its publication last year. It disappeared pretty quickly on account of it being not only wrong scientifically, but dreadfully boring to boot.
CT got Stephen Webb, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, to write the review. Bad idea. Unlike Behe's first book Darwin's Black Box, whose major errors could be ferreted out by anyone capable of a bit of logical thinking, the present volume really…
esiegel | March 28, 2008There's a movie coming out on Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution, called Expelled, and it's narrated/hosted by Ben Stein (right), a TV/film personality who is an overall intelligent guy (and used to have the TV show Win Ben Stein's Money), and used to be a Nixon speechwriter. Politically, he's quite conservative (for example, immediately following 9/11 he gave a speech where he called abortion "the worst form of terrorism"), but this movie is apparently one of the worst abuses of science since What the Bleep do We Know?! came out.
The movie has an innocuous enough premise: is…
gregladen | March 27, 2008The ape human split is a bit of a moving target. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were geneticists who placed it at very recent (close to 4 million years ago) and palaeoanthropologists, using fossils, who placed it at much earlier. During the 1980s, the ape-human split moved back in time because of the importance of sivapithecus, then later in time when Sivapithecus slipped and fell out of the hominid/hominin (human ancestor) family tree. Meanwhile the geneticists were moving towards a more and more recent split. At one point not too long ago, all the evidence converged with the split…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2008
To avoid permanent brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that Vox Popoli be read only through the StupidVu9000
So Vox Day stumbled across my post about the utility of evolutionary biology (among other things) and he went berserk.
Maybe he came across the link by way of ScienceBlogling PZ, and since there's no love lost between those two, he went nuts by association.
Maybe he read the word "emotional" in the post and became absolutely terrified that his tiny little penis would fall off.
Or maybe he's just a complete fucking moron.
I'll lay out what I meant by "moral":
Creationists…
hrynyshyn | March 27, 2008I generally don't bother to draw attention to intra-ScienceBlog warfare, but all hell is breaking loose as our little corner of blogosphere tries to come to grips with the wisdom of telling it like it is. I think it goes to the heart of what may be the fundamental question plaguing American progressives: How does one go about changing the mind of someone who has rejected reason?
It all began when PZ "Pharyngula" Myers was expelled from a screening of the anti-evolution documentary Expelled! PZ responded to his expulsion with his usual witty rejoinders, noting the irony that his companion for…
sporte | March 27, 2008I made this video (below the fold) to illustrate the steps involved in making a phylogenetic tree. The basic steps are to:
Build a data set
Align the sequences
Make a tree
In the class that I'm teaching, we're making these trees in order to compare sequences from our metagenomics experiment with the multiple copies of 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes that we can find in single bacterial genomes. Bacteria contain between 2 to 13 copies of 16S rRNA genes and we're interested in knowing how much they differ from each other. Later, we'll compare the 16S ribosomal RNA genes from multiple species…
laelaps | March 27, 2008Earlier this month I mentioned an article by Suzan Mazur about a "meeting of the minds" that's going to take place this summer to discuss the state of evolutionary theory. I'll be interested to see what comes out of the symposium, but the 16 invited scientists aren't going to be constructing a new formulation of evolutionary theory by themselves that everyone else will be obliged to accept, and I think the importance of the meeting was played up a bit too much in Mazur's article. Now she has authored a second piece on the upcoming conference, and as PZ recently noted, it's even worse than the…
esiegel | March 26, 2008WARNING: Sensationalism ahead! Are you kidding me, Newsweek? They really titled their article Will Physicists Find God? Presumably, the title is named because physicists are searching for the Higgs Particle, and the title is taken after Leon Lederman's (mediocre, IMO) book, The God Particle. Leon's a pretty humorous guy, and was told by his Editor (according to him, anyway) that he couldn't name his book, "The Goddamned Particle," which is what he called the Higgs, so he shortened it.
For better or worse, the article is an interview with Steven Weinberg, one of the most illustrous living…
awild | March 26, 2008
The famous Cambrian Explosion- a rapid diversification of animal groups about 550 million years ago- assumes a rather diminished significance when mapped to the full Tree of Life.
update: yes, I made the diagram myself, by modifying this.
gregladen | March 26, 2008Welcome to Berry Go Round #3, the blog carnival deicated to all things botanical.
The previous installment, Berry Go Round #2, is located here, at Further Thoughts. If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this handy submission form. The Berry Go Round Home Page is here.
Let us begin right away with the Artichokes. Seeds Aside has a piece on the relationship between the artichoke and the cardoon, both known in ADL (ancient dead language) as Cynara cardunculus. The phyloge relatinship between the two, and the story of domestication for each, is very…
pharyngula | March 25, 2008Mike the Mad Biologist wins a gold star for this quote that I'll be stealing:
The other thing we evolutionary biologists don't do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Cunningham, who declared, "Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"
My response was, "In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him."
Now that is good framing.
mikethemadbiologist | March 25, 2008
If you missed my talk, then you missed this slide
I leave to give a talk for a few hours, and suddenly all hell breaks lose on ScienceBlogs over the whole PZ Myers getting expelled from the movie Expelled incident, you damn kids! So I thought I would peeplay too.
First, I'm not sure the charge that this helps the movie is true: since the Great Expulsion, there have been cancellations of some pre-release showings. But this incident, and various ScienceBloglings' reactions to it, to me, appears to be functioning as a Rorschach blot for a whole host of larger issues.
One of the things that…
awild | March 25, 2008
Mycocepurus smithi, in the fungus garden
An exciting week for ant aficionados! A new study by ant phylogenetics gurus Ted Schultz and Seán Brady provides the first detailed picture of attine evolution. These New World ants have long attracted the attention of biologists because they, like our own species, practice a well-developed form of agriculture. Instead of plants, these ants grow fungi, and their relationship is so specialized that the ants can consume nothing else. Schultz and Brady use data from four nuclear genes, the fossil record, and the biology of extant ants to infer an…