evolution
loom | August 3, 2005A statement from the National Science Teachers' Association on Bush's remarks about Intelligent Design:
NSTA Disappointed About Intelligent Design Comments Made by President Bush
2005-08-03 - NSTA
The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the world's largest organization of science educators, is stunned and disappointed that President Bush is endorsing the teaching of intelligent design - effectively opening the door for nonscientific ideas to be taught in the nation's K-12 science classrooms.
"We stand with the nation's leading scientific organizations and scientists, including Dr.…
loom | August 2, 2005The American Geophysical Union just issued a press release in response to Bush's comments about intelligent design. It's not online at their web site yet, so I've posted it here. (Update: It's on line now.) This is not the first time that the 43,000 members of the AGU have spoken out against creationism. They protested the sale of a creationist account of the Grand Canyon in National Park Service stores, and condemned the airing of a creationist movie about cosmology at the Smithsonian Institution. But this is the first time they've taken on the President.
American Geophysical Union 2 August…
loom | August 2, 2005After a day-long road trip from Ohio, I finally had the chance to read the news that President Bush thinks that schools should discuss Intelligent Design alongside evolution, so that students can "understand what the debate is about."
As Bush himself said, this is pretty much the same attitude he had towards creationism when he was a governor. His statements back in Texas didn't actually lead to any changes in Texas schools, and I doubt that these new remarks will have much direct effect, either. But, like Chris Mooney, I'm a journalist, and like him I would have loved to have been in the…
loom | August 1, 2005I've been on hiatus for quite a while, in part because of some surgery (more on that later), but I just wanted to write a quick post to point you to my latest article in tomorrow's New York Times, about how birds can sing like cricket. It's a wonderful example of how sexual selection can alter bodies, not for simple survival but to lure the opposite sex.
loom | July 8, 2005
I've been fascinated by this picture since I first saw it over the weekend. It's a hint of how we may be visualizing life in years to come.
As Darwin was trying to figure out how new species could evolve from old species, he began to think of evolution as a tree. He scribbled some simple branches in a notebook, and then published a more elaborate one in The Origin of Species. Darwin didn't actually put any animals or plants on the branches of these trees; he was just thinking about the process itself. Today, though, evolutionary trees are a common sight in scientific journals, whether…
stcynic | July 7, 2005A reader sent me this link to an article in the New Republic (he thought he'd be the millionth person to send it to me, but in fact it's the first I'd seen it, so thanks!) about how many prominent conservatives feel about evolution. The good news is that many of them were strongly supportive of evolution and saw through the ID marketing campaign quite well. I particularly liked Charles Krauthammer's answers:
Whether he personally believes in evolution: "Of course."
What he thinks of intelligent design: "At most, interesting."
Whether intelligent design should be taught in public schools: "…
loom | June 30, 2005Science Magazine is celebrating its 125th anniversary with 125 big questions that scientists will face in the next 25 years. You can read them all for free here. For the 25 biggest questions, the editors commissioned short essays. I addressed the minor matter of how and where life began.
Fortunately, I get to ask the question. I don't have to provide the final answer. A science writer's prerogative.
loom | June 30, 2005This week a few more tantalizing clues about the origin of language popped up.
I blogged here and here about a fierce debate over the evolution of language. No other species communicates quite the way humans do, with a system of sounds, words, and grammar that allows us to convey an infinite number of ideas. While particular languages are the products of different cultures, the basic capacity for language appears to be built into our species. Some scientists argue that language is primarily the product of natural selection working within the hominid lineage over the past few million years.…
loom | June 28, 2005Last year I went to a fascinating symposium in honor of the great evolutionary biologist George Williams. The March issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology ran a series of papers written by the speakers at the meeting that offered much more detail on how Williams had influenced them in their various fields. Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan gave one of the most interesting talks at the meeting on maladaptation and what it means to human medicine. You can download the pdf from his web site.
To whet your appetite, here's a nice passage on the eye:
"It works well when it works, but…
loom | June 23, 2005In the comments, Doug gets exasperated with some recent posts of mine:
Isn't it amazing how everything seems to provide evidence for evolution? The brain shrinks in some form of pygmy homo erectus. Thats evolution! Ancient genes survive millions of years unchanged. That's evolution?! Women have orgasms. That's evolution! Although not all women have orgasms and they still manage to reproduce hmm luckily with the right spin...That's evolution! We live in a civil society with people working for cooperative goals. That's evolution! Unfortunately some people murder and rape. Just an unfortunate…
loom | June 21, 2005Back in 1986 a biologist named Cindy Lee Van Doverwas poking around the innards of shrimp from the bottom of the sea. They came from a hydrothermal vent in the Atlantic, where boiling, mineral-rich water came spewing up from cracks in the Earths crust and supported rich ecosystems of tube-worms, microbes, crabs, and other creatures. The animals that lived around these vents were generally blind, which wasnt surprising considering that no sunlight could reach them. But Van Dover noticed that they had two flaps of tissue running along their backs that connected to nerves. Closer inspection…
loom | June 21, 2005
Ive got an article in todays New York Times about jellyfish and their kinknown as cnidarians. Cnidarians look pretty simple, which helped earn them a reputation as simple and primitive compared to vertebrates like us, as well as insects, squid, and other creatures with heads and tails, eyes, and so on (known as bilaterians). But it turns out that a lot of the genes that map our complex anatomy are lurking in cnidarians, too. Scientists are now pondering what all that genetic complexity does for the cnidarians. Theyre also using these findings to get a better idea of how the major groups of…
loom | June 9, 2005I've been meaning to get around to writing about female orgasms.
Philosopher of science Elizabeth Lloyd just published a new book in which she rejects the idea that they are an adapation. Then a paper was just published tying variation in the experience of orgasms to genes.
Unfortunately, I've been hideously overworked this week. Fortunately, Elizabeth Lloyd herself is no stranger to the blogosphere, and she's written an interesting post on the paper. Her conclusion: heritability does not equal adaptation, and some scientists need to think more carefully about the evolutionary implications of…
loom | June 5, 2005
Its strange enough that beetles grow horns. But its especially strange that beetles grow so many kinds of horns. This picture, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution, shows a tiny sampling of this diversity. The species shown here all belong to the genus Onthophagus, a group of dung beetles. The colors in this picture, which are false, show which parts of the beetle body the horns grow from. Blue horns grow from the back of the head, red from the middle of the head, and purple from the front of the head. Green horns grow from the center of the body plate directly…
loom | May 19, 2005Today in Science scientists reported a potentially big advance in creating embryos that can be used for stem cell transplants. Briefly put, they figured out how to take skin cells from patients, inject them into donated eggs emptied of their own DNA, and nurture them along until they had divided into a few cells. The cells were able to develop into a wide range of cell types, their chromosomes were normal, and they were so similar to the cells of the indvidual patients that they would not be rejected as foreign tissue. The research stopped there, but the dream behind this work is to heal your…
loom | May 4, 2005Judging from fossils and studies on DNA, the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos lived roughly six million years ago. Hominids inherited the genome of that ancestor, and over time it evolved into the human genome. A major force driving that change was natural selection: a mutant gene that allowed hominids to produce more descendants than other versions of the gene became more common over time. Now that scientists can compare the genomes of humans, chimpanzees, mice, and other animals, they can pinpoint some of the genes that underwent particularly strong natural selection…
loom | May 1, 2005On Thursday I predicted that pundits would make the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed woodpecker an opportunity to criticise predictions that humans are causing mass extinctions--while conveniently ignoring evidence that goes against their claims. Today I came across the first case I know of, which appears a short Week-in-Review piece about the woodpeckers in the New York Times. (You have to scroll down a bit to the article.)
First, a conservation biologist is quoted saying that most things that scientists think are extinct are extinct. The article then ends with this:
But Stephen Budiansky,…
loom | April 28, 2005From time to time, scientists discover that a species that was once thought to have become extinct is actually surviving in some remote place. If the species is a salamander or a lemur, it gets a quick headline and then promptly goes back to its obscure, tenuous existence. But here's one rediscovered creature that I suspect will get some major press: the Ivory-billed woodpecker is back. Science is publishing a paper in which scientists report several sightings and a video of the magnificent bird, which hadn't been seen since in the United States since 1944. Here is a report from the AP.
The…
loom | April 13, 2005This morning the New York Times reported that the National Geographic Society has launched the Genographic Project, which will collect DNA in order to reconstruct the past 100,000 years of human history.
I proceeded to shoot a good hour nosing around the site. The single best thing about it is an interactive map that allows you to trace the spread of humans across the world, based on studies on genetic markers. I'm working on a book about human evolution (more details to come), and I've gotten a blinding headache trying to keep studies on Y-chromosome markers in Ethiopian populations and…
loom | April 12, 2005I have a weakness common to many bloggers--I like to check my site meter to see who's coming to my blog, and from where. Often I wind up discovering intriguing sites run by people whose interests run along the same lines as mine, such as evolutionary biology. Today, however I was surprised to see a lot of traffic coming from Answers in Genesis, a creationist web site.
First off, greetings to all visitors who come through the link. I hope you find some interesting things here.
I decided to investigate the source of the link, and the results were interesting. It turns out that today Answers in…