evolution
tfk | April 12, 2012On Tuesday, Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee allowed HB 368 to become law; it is the second of this new generation of creationist laws, along with a similar bill in Louisiana. Haslam refused to sign the bill, stating that it brought confusion, not clarity. He also noted that the bill had overwhelming legislative support (passing by roughly 3-1 margins in both houses), so a veto was unlikely to have any effect.
That morning, as Haslam weighed his options, balancing the concerns expressed by thousands of parents across Tennessee, and the concerns expressed by the state's leading scientists and…
jrosenhouse | April 11, 2012Here's the latest from Michael Ruse, over at the blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is discussing the anti-evolution“academic freedom” bill that just passed in Tennessee:
On the left, the New Atheist movement frightens me immensely. Its supporters openly and explicitly link evolutionary thinking with non-belief, sneering at those (like me) who think that science and religion can exist harmoniously together. I don't care what the law says, politically this is moronic. The citizens of Tennessee, the judges of the Supreme Court, are going to believe that if evolution alone is…
oracknows | April 8, 2012About a year ago, I addressed what might seem to the average reader to be a very simple, albeit clichéd question: If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we cure cancer? As I pointed out at the time, it's a question that I sometimes even ask myself, particularly given that cancer has touched my life. Three years ago, my mother-in-law died of a particularly nasty form of breast cancer. Even though I am a breast cancer surgeon, I still wonder why there was nothing that could save her (and still is nothing that could have saved her if it existed then) from a decline over several months…
oracknows | April 6, 2012Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, and it doesn't help that it's a holiday week plus a week I was traveling. So I dug way back into the archives, back to five years ago, for a little gem that reminds me that I really should write about evolution more. As the AACR meeting showed me this year, it's actually highly relevant to cancer research. Besides, if you haven't been reading at least five years, it's almost certainly new to you!
Well, well, well…
sa smith | April 2, 2012The Young Earth Creationist Intelligent Design Creationist 'Academic Freedom' bill 'authored' by infamous Young Earth Creationist Intelligent Design Creationist 'Academic Freedomist' Sally Kern (introduced this year by King Gus of the Playground) is dead.
The Education Committee didnt even talk about it.
Cant wait to see the exact same bill introduced by the exact same Usual Suspects next year.
**rolleyes**
jrosenhouse | March 21, 2012Truly my career has reached the next phase of its evolution. I have been published at The Huffington Post. Go have a look and let me know what you think!
sa smith | March 18, 2012
Keep this one in your bookmarks for when someone tells you "AWWWWWW! UR JUST MAKING A CARICATURE OF CHRISTIANS! NO ONE ACTUALLY ACTS LIKE THAT!"
Yeah, that guy was for real.
The debate actually makes more sense if you watch it with the nonsensical closed captions turned on.
He is a real Evangelical Christian who, with his intellectual-equal wife, hold political sway in this state.
It. Is. Disgusting.
So why do something like this? Why give this jackass another forum? Why give the appearance of 'debate'?
1-- It was fun.
2-- Young one after young one who came up to me afterwords, SO…
sa smith | March 15, 2012Just a reminder for those of you in the OKC area that I will be debating Steve Kern (infamous husband of infamous Sally Kern) on the topic of Intelligent Design tonight!
Some of Kerns homies advertised for the event too:
Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee
* THURSDAY EVENING - OKC AREA - Dr. Steve Kern, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in OKC, will be debating an OU graduate student this Thursday evening, 7:00 p.m. on the question, "Should Intelligent Design be taught to our children in public schools? The debate will be held in the College Union on the campus of Oklahoma…
pharyngula | March 11, 2012Good news! The gorilla genome sequence was published in Nature last week, and adds to our body of knowledge about primate evolution. Here's the abstract:
Gorillas are humans' closest living relatives after chimpanzees, and are of comparable importance for the study of human origins and evolution. Here we present the assembly and analysis of a genome sequence for the western lowland gorilla, and compare the whole genomes of all extant great ape genera. We propose a synthesis of genetic and fossil evidence consistent with placing the human-chimpanzee and human-chimpanzee-gorilla speciation…
pharyngula | March 8, 2012I am abrupt in my dismissal: I see no evidence nor plausible mechanism for group selection, and I don't even understand why some scientists continue to insist it had to have happened, other than a fondness for some kind of vague deus ex machina to reach down and smooth over the indirect and inefficient mechanisms that can produce altruism and properties of populations. And discomfort with the fact that evolution is weirder and less straightforward than our brains can imagine is not an argument for endorsing wishful thinking.
Jerry Coyne rips into the latest eruption of group selectionism. Go…
pharyngula | March 6, 2012The latest Carnival of Evolution is buggy in more ways than one: I couldn't get it to load in Mac Firefox with all my adblockers in place (but it worked fine on Google Chrome), and also every link is full of bugs. Literal bugs, not the software kind.
All I can say is that it needs more squid. Then not only would it be prettier, but it would be slick and smooth and supple.
(Also on FtB)
jrosenhouse | March 4, 2012The electronic version of Among the Creationists is now available! Yay! Click here for the Kindle version. Click here for the Nook version. The print version will be available soon.
Buy it, read it, and let me know what you think!
sa smith | March 2, 2012'Thinking positively':
Thinking any and all observed phenotypes are observable phenotypes because of some evolutionary reason. Phenotype X must have an evolutionary advantage! Even if Phenotype X appears detrimental/neutral, if Phenotype X wasnt advantageous, it wouldnt exist, right? Survival of the fittest! Evolution! YAY!!!
No, not always.
Evolution is a dirty, messy process. Sometimes shit just happens. There is no reason. No higher purpose, from deities or evolution. It just happens. Chance.
Viruses are happy to provide us with examples of this. First there was HPV. Now herpes…
oracknows | March 1, 2012I've always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another--and justly so, or so I thought. While it's true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny established science. Evolution? They don't believe in it because, apparently, Jesus told them not to. Anthropogenic global warming? they don't buy that, either, because to admit that human activity is resulting in significant climate change would be to be forced to concede that industry isn't an…
sa smith | February 28, 2012Second Annual Hot-Button Debate
The Oklahoma City chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State will host its second annual hot-button debate on Thursday, March 15, 2012, starting at 7:00pm and ending by 8:30pm. The location will be on the campus of Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC)...
The debaters will be Abbie Smith voicing opposition to the resolution: "Intelligent Design should be taught in public school science classrooms".
Debating in favor of the resolution will be Dr. Steve Kern of Olivet Baptist Church in Oklahoma City. http://www.olivetbaptistokc.com/
That…
kbonham | February 28, 2012I know something's amiss when my google news alert returns headlines like these:
Why women who lust after Brad Pitt may just fancy his immune system
It's His Immune System That You Actually Want to Sleep With
The key to male sexiness: A powerful immune system?
and my personal favorite
Antibodies, Not Hard Bodies: The Real Reason Women Drool Over Brad Pitt
These snazy headlines are all pointing to a recent paper in Nature Communications. The paper's methodology is pretty simple: They took 74 Latvian men and immunized them against Hepatitis B. Later, they measured the participants' blood for…
gregladen | February 27, 2012Have you ever read Natural Theology by William Paley? One could say that in it he makes the famous "Watchmaker" analogy. But really, the entire book is little other than the watchmaker analogy. If you were to compare the boringess-interestingness factor of Paley's book with a similar number of pages of anything written by Darwin, it would look like this:
************************************************* Darwin
* Paley
where being over to the right is more interesting. And that could be ANYTHING by Darwin.
I have a small story to tell you (which you may have heard before) and then a…
pharyngula | February 23, 2012I was going to talk about a cool recent paper that described the evolution of novelties by way of modifying modular gene networks, but I started scribbling it up and realized that I was constantly backtracking to explain some fundamental concepts, so I stopped. I was concerned because one of the most common sources of confusion I've found in my students in the past was difficulty in distinguishing phenotypes from the complexities of the underlying genotype, and I have to be slow and thorough in setting up those differences early on until it sinks in, a habit I'm continuing here. It's so easy…
pharyngula | February 21, 2012Last week, I gave a talk at UNLV titled "A counter-revolutionary history of evo devo", and I'm afraid I was a little bit heretical. I criticized my favorite discipline. I felt guilty the whole time, but I think it's a good idea to occasionally step back and think about where we're going and where we should be going. It's also part of some rethinking I've been doing lately about a more appropriate kind of research I could be doing at my institution, and what I want to be doing in the next ten years. And yes, I want to be doing evo devo, so even though I'm bringing up what I see as shortcomings…
tsmith | February 21, 2012I recently gave a talk to a group here in Iowa City, emphasizing just how frequently we share microbes. It was a noontime talk over a nice lunch, and of course I discussed how basically we humans are hosts to all kinds of organisms, and analysis of our "extended microbiome" shows that we share not only with each other, but also with a large number of other species. We certainly do this with my particular organism of interest, Staphylococcus aureus. There are many reports in the literature showing where humans have apparently spread their strains of S. aureus to their pets (dogs, cats,…