evolution
gregladen | March 25, 2008A "radiation" (sometimes called an "adaptive radiation") is when a single ancestral species gives rise to a number of novel species, often in a fairly short (geological) period of time. Following this radiation event, it seems often to be the case that subsequent speciation is less common. In fact, many living clades that have only a small number of extant species have such radiations in their history. It is quite possible that the radiation event occurred for reasons local in time and space, such as a recent extinction leaving various niches open, or the presence of a particular…
gregladen | March 25, 2008You've probably already seen this: it is a bunch of crazy home schooling creationists demonstrating that they are utter, incurable morons. In this video, they are seen committing child abuse. Again and again and again.
I stole it from Pharangula, he stole it from Sandwalk.
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO APPEASE THESE PEOPLE, PEOPLE??????
Chris and Matt do.
esiegel | March 24, 2008This is some very basic biology: when resources are unlimited and there are no pressures on a species, its population grows exponentially. There's also no evolution other than random mutations; without selection pressures (regardless of whether it's natural or artificial), the genetic information content of a species doesn't change appreciably.
Biologists make use of this to perform tests on certain cells. If you simply put a population of cells in a petrie dish and left them there, they start out by doing this:
They divide. They take over the dish. But then, they run out of room. And when…
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2008
I once sat across the table from Alex Rosenberg, a well known philosopher, who argued persuasively that one cannot be both a Christian and accept natural selection. I think Alex intended this as a reductio for Christianity, as natural selection is both true by definition and also observed in the real world. Is it correct?
The recent Frame Wars (which followed the Clone Wars) suggest this is really what's at issue in the Expelled case (Yes, I said I wouldn't post on it, but this is broader than that kerfuffle). Is accepting evolution going to make nasty atheists of us all?
Let's think of…
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2008
This is a nice review in New Scientist, obviously "framed" more in sorrow and confusion than in anger, which ends with
Throughout the entire experience, Maggie and I couldn't help feeling that the polarised audience in the theater was a sort of microcosm of America, and let me tell you - it's a scary place. I also couldn't help thinking that the intelligent design folks aren't being silenced, so much as they're being silent. Because when it comes to actually explaining anything, they've got nothing to say.
edyong | March 24, 2008Bdelloid rotifers are one of the strangest of all animals. Uniquely, these small, freshwater invertebrates reproduce entirely asexually and have avoided sex for some 80 million years. At any point of their life cycle, they can be completely dried out and live happily in a dormant state before being rehydrated again.
This last ability has allowed them to colonise a number of treacherous habitats such as freshwater pools and the surfaces of mosses and lichens, where water is plentiful but can easily evaporate away. The bdelloids (pronounced with a silent 'b') have evolved a suite of…
gregladen | March 24, 2008Myers? Myers? .... Myers? ..... Myers? (He's not here, Ben ... Your producer threw him out.)You know about the incredibly ironic dust up, whereby Expelled! producers kicked PZ myers out of line at a pre-release showing, but failed to notice that Richard Dawkins was standing right next to him. The evidence suggests that this major bit of bad publicity for Expelled! may have led to the movie being pulled from some pre-release showings. It it too early to be sure of this, and there may be several factors other than the utter embarrassment of this incident at play here. For instance, it is…
laelaps | March 24, 2008The origin of bipedalism, one of the classic traits popularly cited to separate humans from other primates, has long been a controversial area of research. A number of hypotheses have been floated over the years, but now that more fossil material from the time around the chimpanzee/human split has been uncovered researchers have been able to get a better idea of just how old bipedalism is. In a new paper published in Science, Brian Richmond and William Jungers suggest that the remains of the 6 million year old Orrorin tugenensis provide the earliest known postcranial evidence of hominin…
evolvingthoughts | March 23, 2008
So here's a neo-Thomist talking about species, and not getting it due to (i) prior metaphysical commitments, and (ii) not understanding Aristotle - dude, he never called anything a species, not in the biological sense. Eidos and genos were just ordinary words he coopted for the Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics. He used them interchangeably in the Liber Animalia, and sometimes didn't use either words for living kinds. Rule Number One: You can't do science by definitions.
Here's a furore (is that pronounced "few-roar" or "few-ror-ay"?) about whether to respond to the Expelled gaff. Nisbet…
oracknows | March 23, 2008...because Boston skeptics get to have all the fun with a meeting of Skeptics in the Pub on Monday, March 24 at The Asgard (great name for a pub!) in Cambridge at 7 PM. Keynote speaker for the night is our very own Mike the Mad Biologist. We've done a little blog tag-teaming in the past of some idiotic arguments by creationists claiming that evolution is unnecessary to understand the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria; so it's a shame I don't live in Boston.
Oh, well. One of these days I need to find out if there's a skeptics' group in my neck of the woods.
cmooney | March 23, 2008Read it for yourself. People actually involved in the promotion of films, like Randy Olson or this screenwriter, Kevin Miller, understand perfectly well how such a controversy helps Ben Stein. And Miller in particular ought to know: He'll surely get residuals if this film does well.
Why is our side so clueless? I have no idea, but it is eternally frustrating.
clock | March 22, 2008Anne-Marie wrote an excellent review of Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb.
I tend to think that the use of the term "neo-Lamarckism" (just like the use of "neo-Darwinism") is unnecessary as it will raise hackles and start linguistic battles instead of invite people to investigate new ways of thinking and new additions to the body of evolutionary theory.
Yes, we now understand that genes are necessary, but not sufficient, for heritability and we are increasingly including development in our accounts of evolution. And as much as I like the Developmental systems…
gregladen | March 22, 2008A common presumption is that behavior is part of phenotype, and since phenotype arises from genotype (plus/minus Reaction Norm), that there can be a study of "behavioral genetics." This is certainly an overstatement (or oversimplification) for organisms with extensive and/or complex neural systems, such as humans and mice. Neural systems probably evolved (not initially, but eventually) to disassociate behavior with the kind of pre-determined micro-management of behavior that a simple gene-behavior link requires. However, in organisms with neural systems the size of the period at the end of…
cmooney | March 22, 2008So now PZ getting thrown out of Expelled (and Dawkins getting in) triggers New York Times coverage.
If you ask me, this really helps the Expelled people, who want nothing more than controversy. And Dawkins completely doesn't get it:
Dr. Dawkins said the hoopla has been "a gift" to those who oppose creationism. "We could not ask for anything better," he said.
How exactly does that work? How does "hoopla" over an anti-evolution movie help the cause of opposing creationism?
No, I suspect this is a gift to Expelled, a gift to Ben Stein. The controversy raises the profile of the movie, people--…
oracknows | March 22, 2008The other night, I wrote about how the painfully inept and just plain dumb actions of the producer of Expelled!, the neuron-apoptosing movie that's basically an extended argumentum ad Nazium against the dreaded "Darwinism" that blames Hitler, Stalin, and, apparently, puppy hatred on Charles Darwin himself. Basically, the producers were having one of their private screenings (although how one can call a screening for which almost anyone can sign up on the web "private" is beyond me), and, by serendipity, the screening happened to be in the Mall of America on the Thursday before a large atheist…
gregladen | March 21, 2008Genie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education and author of Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction and Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools, will receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Science, from the University of New Mexico.
This will be her sixth honorary degree. Had she known that she would have been bestowed all of these doctorates, would she have bothered with the first, hard earned PhD????
(Probably)
Congratulations Genie!
Details here.
gregladen | March 21, 2008... according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study compares skull measurements of Flores material with a wide range of other hominid data and concludes that Flores cannot be clustered with Homo sapiens. This is the first published study that takes into account how size affects shape. By correcting for size, this study makes, the authors claim, a more valid comparison between measurements taken on the Flores material and other comparative data.
We show that whether or not the effects of its small cranial size are accounted for, the…
gregladen | March 21, 2008As you have undoubtedly heard, a group of evolutionary biologists and evolutionary biology supporters attended a showing of the movie Expelled, in the Twin Cities, last night. This group included the very famous Richard Dawkins and the only slightly less famous PZ Myers. PZ and Richard, in fact, were together in line, along with PZ's spouse, a daughter, and a future son in law. Other evolution supporters and at least one local evolutionary-type blogger were also in line.
While waiting in line and minding their own business, PZ was spotted by the Expelled! production staff, and EXPELLED…
mikethemadbiologist | March 21, 2008While I wasn't put out by this article by ScienceBlogling Chris Mooney as others were, it did make me think about how evolutionary biologists are viewed. One of the things I've seen floating around the internets, and this is seems to be 'bipartisan', is the equating of evolutionary biology with evolutionary psychology.
I've always been puzzled by this since many evolutionary biologists are skeptical about evolutionary psychology. If you went to a Society for the Study of Evolution meeting, many biologists, if not cautious or skeptical about evolutionary psychology, would be downright…