evolution
pharyngula | October 25, 2011There aren't enough children's books telling the story of evolution — every doctor's office seems to be stocked with some ludicrous children's book promoting that nonsensical Noah's ark story, but clean, simple, and true stories about where we came from are scarce. Here's one, a new children's book called Bang! How We Came to Be by Michael Rubino. Each page is formatted the same: on the left, a color picture of an organism (or, on the early pages, a cosmological event); on the right, a short paragraph in simple English explaining what it is and when it occurred. The book just marches forward…
pharyngula | October 20, 2011In my previous post, I described the misguided approach Gauger and Axe have taken to criticizing evolution, and one of the peculiarities of their criticism is that they cited another paper by a paper by Carroll, Ortlund, and Thornton which traced (successfully) the evolutionary history of a class of proteins. Big mistake. As I pointed out, one of the failings of the Gauger/Axe approach is that they're asking how one protein evolved into a cousin protein, without considering the ancestral history …they make the error of trying to argue that an extant protein couldn't have directly evolved into…
pharyngula | October 5, 2011It's a conference, in Oregon, and it's about The Future of Evo-Devo, all wonderful things, and it's on 10-12 February — right in the thick of the traditional Darwin Day hoopla, the days when I'm like a big egg-laying bunny at Easter. I'm already booked for Pullman, Washington, then Florida, then Las Vegas in that week.
You'll just have to go in my place and report back. Yes, you — the one looking around quizzically and wondering "why me?" Because I said so. Book it now. Portland, 10 February, the Nines Hotel.
Coincidentally, I'm giving a talk at UNLV that is kind of about the future of evo-…
pharyngula | October 5, 2011Ever want to look at the recurrent laryngeal nerve in a giraffe? Now you can.
Richard Dawkins Demonstrates Laryngeal Nerve of... by blindwatcher
(Also on FtB)
milhayser | September 30, 2011A new paper published in the journal Animal Behavior tackles the origin of the female orgasm—does it have gender-specific advantages, or is it merely a byproduct of male adaptations? Having polled 10,000 twins about their orgasmic tendencies, researchers found "no significant correlation between opposite-sex twins and siblings" and therefore concluded that "selection pressures on male orgasmic function do not act substantively on female orgasmic function." PZ Myers writes "the logic of this experiment falls apart at every level." He points to the inevitable biases that affect self-…
oracknows | September 30, 2011I've gotten into quite a few arguments over whether there is more anti-science nonsense on the right or the left lately. Actually, none of these arguments have been on the blog, mainly because I tend not to relish getting into discussions that are far more weighted towards politics than actual science or medicine. Still, sometimes I see something that leads me to think about venturing into the minefield of science and politics. This has been particularly true ever since the campaign for the Republican nomination has shifted into high gear and Michelle Bachmann's recent descent even further…
pharyngula | September 27, 2011Steven Pinker has a new book coming out next week, and I'm very much looking forward to it. It is titled The Better Angels Of Our Nature: How Violence Has Declined, and its premise is that humans have been becoming increasingly less violent over time. I'm very sympathetic to this view: I think cooperation, not conflict, has been the hallmark of human evolution.
There's an overview of Pinker's argument at Edge.
Believe it or not--and I know most people do not--violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. The…
jdupuis | September 26, 2011My 2011 summer reading was pretty meagre this year. For various reasons too boring to go into here, there wasn't much actually much vacation for me this summer. I think I'll probably have a better December/Christmas reading list than summer. Such is life.
Anyways, what I did read was pretty good, so let's get to it.
Bradbury, Ray and Ron Wimberly. Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes: The Authorized Adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. 144pp. ISBN-13: 978-0809087464
Bradbury, Ray and Dennis Calero. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: The Authorized Adaptation. New York…
tfk | September 21, 2011A couple weeks ago, Fox News released a new poll asking about evolution and creationism. It didn't strike me as especially noteworthy, though it does show a statistically significant rise in acceptance of evolution (21% think "the theory of evolution as outlined by Darwin and other scientist" is "more likely to be the explanation for the origin of human life on earth") since they last asked the same question in 1999 (when it was just 15%).
That matches the small but statistically significant rise in support for unguided evolution seen in the nearly 30 years that Gallup has been polling on…
pharyngula | September 13, 2011I criticized the Zietsch and Santilla paper on the female orgasm. Now one of the authors has responded.
One response he makes is that some of the limitations to the study that I pointed out were also explicitly recognized in the paper. This is true; however, my purpose in mentioning them was to highlight the fact that they make it impossible to draw even the tentative conclusions the authors do…which obviously is not something that was done in the paper. Admitting that assessing orgasmic function with self-reports, for instance, is a limitation doesn't really change the fact that extremely…
pharyngula | September 11, 2011One of my favorite science books ever is Elisabeth Lloyd's The Case of the Female Orgasm, which does a beautiful job of going case-by-case through postulated adaptive explanations for female orgasms and showing the deficiency of the existing body of work. It's a beautiful example of the application of rigorous scientific logic; it does not disprove that female orgasms have an adaptive function, but does clearly show that the scientists who have proposed such functions have not done the work necessary to demonstrate that fact, and that some of the explanations are countered by the evidence.…
pharyngula | September 6, 2011As Jerry Coyne has alerted us, there is a free evolutionary biology textbook available on Kindle — grab it while you can (if you don't have a kindle, just put the free Kindle app on your computer).
I haven't had a chance to look the book over myself. Eugene Koonin is a respected name, but books that claim to establish a "Fundamentally New Evolutionary Synthesis" put me off a bit. Other stuff in the summary sounds interesting, though, just downplay the grandiose claims a bit when reading it.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | September 3, 2011Ann Coulter is back to whining about evolution again, and this week she focuses on fossils. It's boring predictable stuff: there are no transitional fossils, she says.
We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record - for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)
Darwin postulated that whales could have evolved from bears, but he was wrong…as we now know because we found a lot of transitional fossils in whale evolution. Carl Zimmer has a summary of recent discoveries, and I wrote…
milhayser | September 1, 2011
Evidence that life on Earth is very old (and of humble origin) continues to accrue, but some beliefs are insurmountable. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse refutes the argument that the evolution of complex molecules and organisms is highly improbable. He notes that if we "imagine evolution proceeding by selecting genotypes entirely at random, then the probability is vanishingly small that we shall ever find one that produces a functional, complex organism." But since natural selection only builds upon what works, it's a smaller wonder that we're here to argue about it. On Dispatches…
pharyngula | August 29, 2011It only took five years. Remember, my Coulter Challenge was for someone to take any of Coulter's paragraphs about evolution from her book Godless, and cogently defend its accuracy. It's been surprising how few takers there have been: lots of wingnuts have praised the book and said it is wonderful, but no one has been willing to get specific and actually support any of its direct claims. Until now.
It takes that special combination of arrogance and ignorance to think anything Coulter said is defensible, so I suppose it's not a huge surprise that our brave foolhardy contestant is Michael Egnor…
pharyngula | August 27, 2011So Bryan Fischer came out swinging like a lunkhead, and now Ann Coulter scurries out to try and get in a sucker punch. Neither are very effective.
Roughly one-third of my 2006 No. 1 New York Times best-seller, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," is an attack on liberals' creation myth, Darwinian evolution. I presented the arguments of all the luminaries in the field, from the retarded Richard Dawkins to the brilliant Francis Crick, and disputed them.
But apparently liberals didn't want to argue back.
I do, I do! I read Godless — it was appallingly bad, packed full of very poor rants made…
pharyngula | August 27, 2011I'm getting too old for this. The idiots keep making the same arguments, over and over again, and they just get dumber with every iteration. Bryan Fischer makes me want to stick an icepick in my brain just to stop the stupidity coming out of his mouth.
His latest article is Defeating Darwin in four steps…and I read the title and instantly predicted what his four objections would be before I even looked at the first sentence — I'd apply for Randi's million dollar challenge, except reading the mind of a droning cretin isn't much of a challenge.
You really need to listen to Fischer's awful radio…
mikethemadbiologist | August 24, 2011By way of Matthew Yglesias, we read that,over at National Review Online, Kevin Williamson claims progressives only care about science as a way to wage culture war (yes, coming from movement conservatives, that's rich):
There are lots of good reasons not to wonder what Rick Perry thinks about scientific questions, foremost amongst them that there are probably fewer than 10,000 people in the United States whose views on disputed questions regarding evolution are worth consulting, and they are not politicians; they are scientists. In reality, of course, the progressive types who want to know…
pharyngula | August 21, 2011Jerry Coyne is mildly incensed — once again, there's a lot of
recent hype about epigenetics, and he doesn't believe it's at all revolutionary. Well, I've written about epigenetics before, I think it's an extremely important subject central to our understanding of development, and…I agree with him completely. It's important, we ought to spend more time discussing it in our classes, but it's all about the process of gene expression, not about radically changing our concepts of evolution. I like to argue that what multigenerational epigenetic effects do is blur out or modulate the effects of…
pharyngula | August 14, 2011This is one beautiful plesiosaur, Polycotylus latippinus.
(Click for larger image)
(A) Photograph and (B) interpretive drawing of LACM 129639, as mounted. Adult elements are light brown, embryonic material is dark brown, and reconstructed bones are white. lc indicates left coracoid; lf, left femur; lh, left humerus; li, left ischium; lp, left pubis; rc, right coracoid; rf, right femur; rh, right humerus; ri, right ischium; and rp, right pubis.
The unique aspect of this specimen is that it's the only pregnant plesiosaur found; the fore and hind limbs bracket a jumble of bones from a juvenile…