evolution
pharyngula | July 12, 2011That's not hyperbole. I really mean it. How else could I react when I open up the latest issue of Bioessays, and see this: Cephalopod origin and evolution: A congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules. Just from the title alone, I'm immediately launched into my happy place: sitting on a rocky beach on the Pacific Northwest coast, enjoying the sea breeze while the my wife serves me a big platter of bacon, and the cannula in my hypothalamus slowly drips a potent cocktail of cocain and ecstasy direct into my pleasure centers…and there's pie for dessert. It's like the…
pharyngula | July 7, 2011I found a recent paper in Nature fascinating, but why is hard to describe — you need to understand a fair amount of general molecular biology and development to see what's interesting about it. So those of you who already do may be a little bored with this explanation, because I've got to build it up slowly and hope I don't lose everyone else along the way. Patience! If you're a real smartie-pants, just jump ahead and read the original paper in Nature.
A little general background.
Let's begin with an abstract map of a small piece of a strand of DNA. This is a region of fly DNA that encodes a…
pharyngula | June 30, 2011I got a letter from a creationist today, claiming that "Darwinism is falsified," based on an article in Nature. It's kind of amazing; this article was just published today, and the metaphorical digital ink on it is barely metaphorically dry, and creationists are already busily mangling it.
It's a good article describing some recent fossil discoveries, found in a 515 million year old deposit in South Australia. Matthew Cobb has already summarized the paper, so I'll be brief on the details, but it's very cool. What was found was a collection of arthropod eye impressions, probably from cast-off…
gregladen | June 28, 2011I heard it said recently that "Evolution" and "Origin of life" are two separate issues. I know that this is a falsehood, and I'll discuss in a moment how and why it is not true. But first, I checked around with a few people that I know and love, and found out that some of them assumed this was true. I think it is something that has been said enough times that if you are not personally engaged in the research or just don't think about it enough, you can easily assume that this is what the experts say. But they don't.
It is possible that there is a nefarious force working here. And I'm…
pharyngula | June 28, 2011I tell other scientists all the time that their work is being appropriated by creationists who barely understand it, and that it is getting distorted to support bogus pseudoscience. Whenever you see a creationist quote a genuine science paper, you can pretty much trust that it is going to be mangled beyond recognition.
For instance, Jonathan MacLatchie raised a peculiar collection of questions to grill me with; here's one of them.
9) If, as is often claimed by Darwinists, the pharyngeal pouches and ridges are indeed accurately thought of as vestigial gill slits (thus demonstrating our shared…
pharyngula | June 27, 2011Harry Lonsdale is a godless Oregonian who has just offered a $50,000 prize plus $2,000,000 in funding for research into the origins of life.
A millionaire scientist who once ran as a Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate has just launched a $50,000 prize to promote research on the origin of life. Yes, he has an ulterior motive: He hopes that researchers working on the question will eventually prove that life's origins can be fully explained by physical and chemical processes, without invoking a creator.
Harry Lonsdale is a chemist in Bend, Oregon, who made a fortune when he sold his drug…
oracknows | June 26, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll post two, one older, one more recent, but both about the same topic. This one's from 2007, which means that if you haven't been reading at least four years it's new to you.
A common refrain among…
pharyngula | June 25, 2011It's like talking to a brick wall: MacLatchie is appallingly obtuse. When last I argued with him, I pointed out that the major failing of his entire developmental argument against evolution was that it was built on a false premise. As I said then,
I can summarize it with one standard template: "Since Darwinian evolution predicts that development will conserve the evolutionary history of an organism, how do you account for feature X which doesn't fit that model?" To which I can simply reply, "Evolution does not predict that development will conserve the evolutionary history of an organism,…
oracknows | June 23, 2011Remember Michael Egnor?
I bet many of you do. If you were reading this blog three or four years ago, Dr. Egnor was a fairly regular target topic of my excretions of not-so-Respectful Insolence. The reason for that was, at the time, I was quite annoyed that a fellow surgeon could so regularly lay down such incredible blasts of pseudoscientific nonsense in the defense of his "intelligent design" creationism views. Back then he did this as a semi-regular blogger for a blog that is a propaganda outlet for the crank ID propagandists at Discovery Institute in much the same way that Age of Autism is…
vlicata | June 23, 2011Reblogitation (pronounced with a "j" sound for the "g", of course): the blogospheric phenomenon of reposting, and re-reposting, and re-re-reposting the information from the "apparent first" or "most snarky" report (or blog post) about a news item.
Mother-post: the "apparent first" or "most snarky" report of an item, that then provides "the facts" for most of the other stories about that item online (even those that don't reference or link to the mother-post).
The flurry of recent news about the question "Should evolution be taught in public schools?" that was asked of the recent crop of MIss…
pharyngula | June 23, 2011This one uses cricket sex to correct naive ideas about how selection works.
jrosenhouse | June 22, 2011I'm sure we're all familiar with the creationist chestnut that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. For people with a basic science education it is something of a litmus test. As soon as you hear someone make this argument you can be certain that you are dealing with a crank. You see, if someone says that he has considered the evidence for evolution and finds it unconvincing, we might shake our heads in disbelief or wonder how seriously he has studied the matter, but in the end it is a matter of opinion whether the evidence is compelling. But if someone says that evolution…
gregladen | June 22, 2011There's been a fair amount of talk about the Miss USA interview question "should evolution be taught in schools," and a fair amount of attention given to the answers provided by the contestants. For the most part, people have gotten mad at these women because they are both beautiful in a classic patriarchal-normative-way and are handmaidens or hobgoblins or whatever of the sexist system in which we live, and because they are all wrong about evolution and whether or not it should be taught in schools.
But, it is not so simple.
I've actually seen it written that all but two, or all but one,…
pharyngula | June 22, 2011Darryl Cunningham has a new comic explaining evolution — read the whole thing.
jdupuis | June 21, 2011A couple of odd ones from last week's Inside Higher Ed, both related to the way scholarship, higher education and the intelligent design/creationism movement intersect.
First up, Blasphemy of a Different Kind, involving people possibly being fired for teaching evolution at an Adventist school. Although the university involved claims that the firings weren't related to the teaching of evolution, it's hard to imagine that there wasn't some connection.
The president of La Sierra's board of trustees on Friday asked for the resignations of Jeff Kaatz, the vice president for university…
pharyngula | June 21, 2011You can find a thorough explanation at Scientific American, which can be summarized by one simple phrase: Natural selection isn't all-powerful. There are other complicating factors that Jeremy Yoder mentions as well — I might summarize that as "evolution is more complicated than you think."
He did leave out a few important factors, though. One is pleiotropy; same-sex preference could be genetically coupled to some other attribute that offsets the hypothetical cost in reproduction. Another is that, well, I haven't seen any good data to show that homosexuals actually have a reduced reproductive…
jtoney | June 20, 2011
Miss California Alyssa Campanella wins the 2011 Miss USA Pageant. In preliminary judging, Campenella supported teaching evolution in public schools. In the finals, she gave a complex answer on legalizing marijuana.
Photo Credit: By Valerie Macon, AFP/Getty Images
This is my favorite story of the day:
The newly crowned Miss USA, Alyssa Campanella, 21, of Los Angeles said:
I was taught evolution in high school. I do believe in it. I'm a huge science geek...I like to believe in the big bang theory and, you know, the evolution of humans throughout time.
Of course, other contestants did not…
pharyngula | June 17, 2011Jonathan MacLatchie, the creationist who challenged me to answer his questions about development in Glasgow, has posted his account of our encounter and his problems with evolution. It is completely unsurprising — he still doesn't understand any of the points.
Of his 10 questions, 7 were quickly dismissable and were more than thoroughly addressed in my talk. They rest on a deep misconception that is shared with Jonathan Wells and many other pseudoscholarly creationists; I can summarize it with one standard template: "Since Darwinian evolution predicts that development will conserve the…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2011Regarding the German outbreak strain of E. coli, the data are fairly clear: it is an enteroaggregative E. coli ('EAEC') which has acquired antibiotic resistance genes and a Shiga-like toxin from an Shiga-toxinogenic E. coli ('STEC'). EAEC are interesting--according to the European Food Safety Authority:
EAEC have been implicated as a cause of persistent diarrhea in children and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome-associated diarrhea, as well as acute diarrhea in travelers. Not all EAEC strains have been shown to cause diarrhea in humans. The EAEC are a heterogeneous group of bacteria that…