evolution
sa smith | February 20, 2012Arnie is a very happy dog (see photo in upper left). Its always a party when Arnie is around-- He loves everyone and everything...
... Everything, that is, except cats.
It didnt used to be like that. Arnie used to like cats just fine. But then one day, when he was a puppy...
Neighbor: Hey can I introduce my new kitten to Arnie? I want to get a dog later, so I want her to be used to dogs.
Me: Sure!
Arnie: *happyhappyhappynewfriendhappyhappy*
Kitten: *squint*
Arnie: *newfriendnewfriendsofluffyhappyhappyhappy*
Kitten: *squint*
Arnie: *haaaaaaappyhappyhappy...
Kitten: **…
pharyngula | February 14, 2012It's on! Students here at UMM got together and have organized their very own Midwest Science of Origins Conference, to be held in Morris on 30 March-1 April. As the big name speaker, they've got Neil Shubin to tell us all about Tiktaalik, and some other regional folk to talk about physics, biology, anthropology, and philosophy…and also Chris Stedmaaaaaan (you can tell right away that this isn't a case of me dictating to them what to do — this is entirely student-organized and run). Come on out and learn!
What, you say, you can't come all the way out to itty-bitty Morris on the edge of nowhere…
sa smith | February 14, 2012Hey, do you all remember Michael Behe?
Dude was for real 'famous' a while back (not just 'Christian famous'). He went on talk shows and news programs (including the Colbert Report) to talk about his personal brand of Creationism, Intelligent Design.
Unfortunately, things 'didnt go as planned' with Intelligent Design. The courts didnt buy ID, in no small part thanks to the asshatty defense of it given by Michael Behe.
Even The Arguments Regarding Design 'think tank', the Discovery Institute, has abandoned ID in favor of pushing 'academic freedom' bills in state legislatures.
Behe also helped…
sa smith | February 6, 2012Last time I talked about why treating cancer is so hard:
Why havent we cured cancer yeeeeeet?
Briefly, scientists did complete genome sequencing of seven individuals prostate tumors, and things were all kinds of jacked up. Not only were all seven tumors different, but one tumor had over 200 chromosomal rearrangements. Like taking your genome and shuffling it like a deck of cards.
As if that kind of complexity isnt bad enough...
Another group of scientists sequenced the genomes of acute myeloid leukaemia patients pre- and post-treatments:
Clonal evolution in relapsed acute myeloid leukaemia…
pharyngula | February 6, 2012I was on Skeptically Speaking this week, weirdly and uncomfortably talking about the evolution of menstruation. I barrelled ahead anyway, even though I've got a Y chromosome and am not a member of the club. Fortunately, they also had Kate Clancy on to be a little more authoritative.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | February 2, 2012I've been naughty and neglecting to announce these things, so let's start correcting that: here's the 44th Carnival of Evolution.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | January 22, 2012The requirements to be a TV weather presenter are fairly slack: an undergraduate degree with some training in meteorology is preferred, but not required, and the main skills seem to be looking presentable with nice hair, being able to dance with a green screen, and being glib and cheerful. So I guess it's not surprising that the "scientists" leading the charge against global warming are climate-denier TV weathermen. That link takes you to a long list of quotes from various television weather personalities — including a couple from Minneapolis — who all deny reality and use their position as…
gregladen | January 8, 2012Mike Haubrich, of Tangled Up in Blue Guy blog, has documented a discussion between a biologist, a commenter, and the Discovery Institute (a creationist "think" tank). No apes were harmed during this incident, but one of them may be rather embarrassed. It's quite intresting, have a look: Cornelius Godsplains Science to a Scientist
oracknows | January 6, 2012It's no secret that I've been highly critical of The Huffington Post, at least of its approach to science and medicine. In fact, it was a mere three weeks after Arianna Huffington launched her blog back in 2005 that I noticed something very distressing about it, namely that it had recruited someone who would later become and "old friend" (and punching bag) of the blog, Dr. Jay Gordon, as well as the mercury militia stalwart David Kirby, among others. As a result, antivaccination lunacy was running rampant on HuffPo, even in its infancy. Many, many, many more examples followed very quickly.…
pharyngula | January 3, 2012There was something else that bugged me in that odd claim from Ben Radford that girls would just naturally like pink better than boys: it was the terrible evpsych rationale for it that just made no sense.
First was the argument that blue has always been associated with boys, and pink with girls, and therefore it was only natural to sustain the distinction.
The choice of blue for infants has its roots in superstition. In ancient times the color blue (long associated with the heavens) was thought to ward off evil spirits. Even today the tradition continues; in many parts of the world people…
jrosenhouse | December 30, 2011Michael Ruse has written another post about morality. Sadly, he hasn't really clarified much of anything. Throughout this discussion his position has been that there are moral facts that we come to know through non-scientific means. I have been trying to understand how he justifies either part of that, but I'm afraid I still have no idea.
He writes:
First, the complaint that since I think morality is a product of evolution through natural selection, I must therefore be using science to justify my ethical claims. I too am committing the naturalistic fallacy. Not so. Distinguish between…
pharyngula | December 29, 2011I've written about the spectacular phospatized embryos of the Doushantuo formation before. It's a collection of exceptionally well preserved small multicellular organisms, so well preserved that we can even look at cellular organelles. And they're pre-Cambrian, as much as 630 million years old.
They've been interpreted as fossilized embryos for which we have no known adult forms. They certainly look like embryos, but one thing has always bothered me — they all look like blastula-stage embryos at various points in their early divisions, and the absence of later stages was peculiar: how did…
pharyngula | December 21, 2011Menstruation is a peculiar phenomenon that women go through on a roughly monthly cycle, and it's not immediately obvious from an evolutionary standpoint why they do it. It's wasteful — they are throwing away a substantial amount of blood and tissue. It seems hazardous; ancestrally, in a world full of predators and disease, leaving a blood trail or filling a delicate orifice with dying tissue seems like a bad idea. And as many women can tell you, it's uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes debilitating. So why, evolution, why?
One assumption some people might make is that that is just the way…
pharyngula | December 15, 2011A few weeks ago, PLoS One published a paper on the observation of preserved chitin in 34 million year old cuttlebones. Now the Institute for Creation Research has twisted the science to support their belief that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. It was all so predictable. It's a game they play, the same game they played with the soft tissue preserved in T. rex bones. Here's how it works.
Compare the two approaches, science vs. creationism. The creationists basically insert one falsehood, generate a ludicrous conflict, and choose the dumbest of the two alternatives.
The…
pharyngula | November 30, 2011This video has been going around — it's a group of women talking about the importance of evolution to the biological sciences.
I confess to cringing in a few places — there's too much ready equation of evolution with natural selection — but I certainly wouldn't question the competence of these accomplished scientists, even if I might argue with them a bit.
But now the clowns at Uncommon Descent have discovered it and given their assessment.
It shows sixteen female academics or science writers, mostly young, whose enthusiasm for evolution is so overwrought that they turn themselves into…
oracknows | November 17, 2011When it rains it pours, as they say.
Yes, sometimes there's so much going on that I can't possibly blog about it all, particularly now that I've cut back a bit. This week seems to be turning into one of those weeks. Yesterday, I couldn't resist having a bit of fun with the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher when she released a seriously hypocritical and silly press release whining about how mistreated she thinks her organization, the Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has been because the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had the audacity…
tfk | November 9, 2011A month ago, I posted a link to an op-ed in the LA Times which referred to as-yet unpublished research which purported to show no difference in science literacy between people who don't take part in religion and evangelical Christians. Then I did my own analysis of the data, which found significant differences between evangelicals and the nonreligious.
Now, in a special issue of Social Science Quarterly,
Darren Sherkat again shows that evangelicals are less science literate than other groups. The analysis I reported in my previous blog post is actually a bit more sophisticated, and Sherkat'…
pharyngula | November 5, 2011There is actually a cat in this video. Notice, though, that it only appears briefly in the beginning, looks bored, and apathetically wanders off screen. Why? Because the rest of the video features something far more exciting and bizarre than a mere cat: it's all about zombie fish, their brains infected with trematode parasites. The cat knows that it cannot compete, unless it goes off and gets its brain tainted with some freaky strange parasite to give it some character.
Another interesting thing about it is that this video is an attempt to get funding for science research. If you feel like…
gregladen | October 26, 2011Suppose you are an intelligent, thoughtful person with a thirst for information, a desire to be challenged, and a tendency to not accept received knowledge at face value. You are embedded in a traditional Christian culture where most of your family, your child's teachers and friends and those friends' families, the people where you and your spouse work and most people in your social circles assume that Evolution is "only a theory" and should be taught, if at all, along side alternative theories such as that the earth is 6,000 years old and was created in seven days. But you don't want that…
pharyngula | October 26, 2011This is an article about cephalopods and eye evolution, but I have to confess at the beginning that the paper it describes isn't all that interesting. I don't want you to have excessive expectations! I wanted to say a few words about it, though, because it addresses a basic question I get all the time, and while I was at it, I thought I'd mention a few results that set the stage for future studies.
I'm often asked to resolve some confusion: the scientific literature claims that eyes evolved multiple times, but I keep saying that eyes show evidence of common origin. Who is right? Why are you…