evolution
loom | October 15, 2004Yesterday I blogged about how the National Park Service is selling a young-Earth creationist book about the Grand Canyon in its stores. Today the Washington Post wrote an article on the subject. It contains a response from the National Park Service, which I find pretty unbelievable. They claim that they are in fact reviewing the matter. The review was supposed to be done in February, but it's been delayed while lawyers at the Interior and Justice Departments "tackle the issue." No deadline is set for the decision, and the book will continue to be sold until one is made.
Tackle the issue? Do…
loom | October 13, 2004David Appell points to some depressing news about how our government deals with science.
In August 2003, the Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent tried to block the sale of a book in National Park Service stores. The book claims that the Grand Canyon formed in Noah's Flood. No vague ambiguity of the sort you hear from Intelligent Design folks--just hard-core young Earth creationism, claiming that the planet is only a few thousand years old. The folks at National Park Service headquarters stopped the administrator from pulling the book. Geologists cried foul, and NPS promised to review…
loom | October 11, 2004A lot of readers have commented on my recent post about a study that suggests we all share a common ancestor who lived 2,300 years ago. Some people doubted that isolated groups could share such a recent ancestry.
One of the study's authors, Steve Olson (also the author of the book Mapping Human History) sent me the following email yesterday:
"Ensuring a recent common ancestor doesn't take long-range migrations (although contact between the Polynesians and South Americans certainly speeds things up). All it really requires is that a person from one village occasionally mates with a person…
loom | October 11, 2004In March, I wrote a post on some tantalizing new findings about the secrets of human evolution lurking in our genome. In brief, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied a gene called MYH16 that helps build jaw muscles in primates. In our own lineage, the gene has mutated and is no longer active in jaw muscles. Perhaps not coincidentally, we have much smaller, weaker jaws than other apes. The researchers estimated that the gene shut down around 2.4 million years ago--right around the time when hominid brains began to expand. They suggested that shrinking jaw muscles opened up room…
loom | October 4, 2004Contempt is never wise in biology. The creature that you look down on as lowly, degenerate, or disgusting may actually turn out to be sophisticated, successful, and--in some cases--waiting to tell you a lot about yourself. That's certainly the case for lice.
The human body louse, Pediculus humanus, has two ways of making a living--either dwelling on the scalp, feeding on blood, or snuggling into our clothes and come out once or twice a day to graze on our bodies. For lice, we humans are the world. They cannot live for more than a few hours away from our bodies.Only by crawling from one host…
loom | October 4, 2004Congratulations to Linda Buck and Richard Axel for winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine today. They won for their pioneering work on the 600 or so receptors that we use to smell. As is so often the case these days, the research that wins people the Nobel for Medicine also reveals a lot about our evolution. This February, for example, Buck published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which she and her colleagues charted the evolutionary history of human olfactory receptors.
As Buck explains, it appears that many olfactory receptor genes mutated beyond repair in…
loom | September 23, 2004Every now and then you come across a scientific hypothesis that is so elegant and powerful in its ability to explain that it just feels right. Yet that doesn't automatically make it right. Even when an elegant hypothesis gets support from experiments, it's not time to declare victory. This is especially true in biology, where causes and effects are all gloriously tangled up with one another. It can take a long time to undo the tangle, and hacking away at it, Gordian-style, won't help get to the answer any faster.
I was reminded of this while reading Andrew Brown's review of A Reason For…
loom | September 13, 2004Evolution works on different scales. In a single day, HIV's genetic code changes as it adapts to our ever-adapting immune system. Over the course of decades, the virus can make a successful leap from one species to another (from chimpanzees to humans, for example). Over a few thousand years, humans have adapted to agriculture--an adult tolerance to the lactose in milk, for example. Over a couple million years, the brains of our hominid ancestors have nearly doubled. Sometimes scientists distinguish between these scales by calling small-scale change microevolution and large-scale change…
stcynic | September 4, 2004It seems the Worldnutdaily has taken notice of my side project blog, The Panda's Thumb. In an article entitled Anti-evolution paper met with 'hysteria, name-calling', the most consistently wrong news source this side of Pravda has a link to us. A little background is probably necessary. Steven Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, an ID think tank, recently published an article in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington that was essentially a review of ID arguments and a rehashing of Behe, Dembski and Wells. There was no actual…
loom | September 2, 2004Today scientists took another step towards creating the sort of simple life forms that may have been the first inhabitants of Earth. I wrote a feature for the June issue of Discover about this group, led by Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School. Szostak and his colleagues suspect that life started out not with DNA, RNA, and proteins, but just RNA. This primordial RNA not only carried life's genetic code, but also assembled new RNA molecules and did other biochemical jobs. Szostak and others have created conditions in their labs under which today's RNA can evolve into a form able to cary…
loom | August 30, 2004While doing some research on human evolution, I stumbled across the web site for a wonderful meeting that was held in March at San Diego to celebrate the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome. You can watch the lectures here. By comparing the chimp genome to the human genome, scientists are discovering exactly how we evolved into the peculiar species that we are. If you find yourself in an argument with someone who claims that evolution has nothing to do with cutting edge science, plunk them down in front of these talks. Without evolution, genomics is gibberish.
(Note--Oliver Baker informs me…
loom | August 27, 2004Is Intelligent Design the same thing as creationism? The people who back Intelligent Design have spilled an awful lot of ink saying they're different. Even self-proclaimed creationists have tried to claim a difference. Somehow, both of these camps think that any confusion between the two is evidence of the lazy arrogance of evolutionists. In fact, the evidence points towards Intellgent Design being just a bit of clever repackaging to get creationist nonsense into the classroom. (See this useful article.)
A little clarity has emerged over at the new Sarkar Lab Weblog. They've created a "…
loom | August 26, 2004If you took a census of life on Earth, you'd probably find that the majority of life forms looked like this. It's a virus known as a bacteriophage, which lives exclusively in bacteria. There are about 10 million phages in every milliliter of coastal sea water. All told, scientists put the total number of bacteriophages at a million trillion trillion (10 to the 30th power). Bacteriophages not only make up the majority of life forms, but they are believed to have existed just about since life itself began. Since then, they have been evolving along with their hosts, and even making much of their…
loom | August 25, 2004Spiteful bacteria. Two words you probably haven't heard together. Then again, you probably haven't heard of altruistic bacteria either, but both sorts of microbes are out there--and in many cases in you.
Bacteria lead marvelously complicated social lives. As a group of University of Edinburgh biologists reported today in Nature, a nasty bug called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which causes lung infections, dedicates a lot of energy to helping its fellow P. aeruginosa. The microbes need iron, which is hard for them to find in a usable form in our bodies. To overcome the shortage, P. aeruginosa can…
loom | August 23, 2004Marriage, we're told by the president and a lot of other people, can only be between one man and one woman. Anything else would go against thousands of years of tradition and nature itself. If the president's DNA could talk, I think it might disagree.
In the 1980s, geneticists began to study variations in human DNA to learn about the origin of our species. They paid particular attention to the genes carried by mitochondria, fuel-producing factories of the cell. Each mitochondrion carries its own small set of genes, a peculiarity that has its origins over two billion years ago, when our single…
stcynic | August 3, 2004Came across this on Will Wilkinson's blog (another blog you really should be reading regularly; Will is a top notch thinker) and it gave me one of those wonderful moments that only those who love ideas can relate to. The greatest joy for an intellectual is that moment when you come across an idea that hadn't occured to you before and you had never encountered in someone else's writings either, especially when that idea involves something you have given a lot of thought to. This is a perfect example of such a moment. I've thought and read about evolution a lot, obviously. I've also thought and…
stcynic | August 3, 2004Steve Reuland, my fellow Panda's Thumb contributor who is finishing his PhD in genetics, has also written a fisking of Rodney Stark's pathetic attempt to jump into a field he has no knowledge of. I particularly liked his response to Stark's silly claim that mammals and reptiles are examples of genera:Needless to say, anyone who thinks that mammals are a genus and that elephants comprise a single species needs to be hit over the head with a grade-school text book and forever disbarred from opening his mouth when it comes to biology. His bombast about species boundaries being firm and distinct…
stcynic | August 2, 2004The sociologist Rodney Stark, writing for the American Enterprise Institute (why? I have no idea), has given us a delightfully ridiculous little article called Fact, Fable and Darwin. Now ordinarily I take articles like this and rip them apart claim for claim, but I wanna try something different this time. I want to throw this one open to my readers to discover and point out to others all of the misrepresentations, distortions and outright falsehoods it contains. And believe me, they are vast in number. Indeed, the fact the article was written by an otherwise reputable scholar (writing far…
stcynic | July 26, 2004As I often do, I sent a link to my article, Idiot of the Week? Or Liar of the Week?, to the target of my criticism, Robert Meyer, and invited a response. That has led to a brief exchange of e-mails, which I will reprint here along with a further response to the last one from Mr. Meyer. I will put his words in italics and mine in regular type. Here is the first response he made, interspersed with the reply I made in e-mail:
Checked out your article. Interesting disscussion. But, of course saying that Punctuated Equilibrium is nothing like the Hopeful Monster theory, etc. rings hallow when…
stcynic | July 8, 2004In the comments on a post made some weeks ago, an exchange has begun between myself and William Gibbons, a creationist, concerning the evidence for evolution. There are several issues there that really can't be settled for quite some time, but I want to move the main part of the dispute, the evidence for evolution, up here into its own post so it won't get lost in the shuffle. Examining issues like this and the creationist claims concerning them is important, I think. He asked me to provide the 10 best evidences for evolution and I said let's just start with one and referred to a statement I…