evolution
loom | January 12, 2004Last week I briefly mentioned some stark estimates about the potential extinctions that could be triggered by global warming. Since then, some global warming skeptics have tried to pour cold water on these results by making some dubious claims about natural selection and extinctions. While I have reported about global warming from time to time, I leave blogging on the subject to others (particularly David Appell over at Quark Soup). But in this case, evolution is drawn into the mix.
Here, in a nutshell, is what the scientists wrote last week in their Nature paper (which the editors have made…
stcynic | January 12, 2004Intelligent design advocates have been furiously busy trying to find a way to sneak their views into science classrooms around the country. In Kansas, Ohio, Texas, New Mexico, Michigan and several other states, they have tried a variety of tactics to get in to the curriculum. But if this is any indication of what they want to do with education, I'm not sure whether to be alarmed or amused....
William Dembski is one of the leading voices of the IDC crowd. My friend Rob Pennock sets the scene in his article Wizards of ID on Metanexus:IDC is a theological movement crafted to win a particular…
stcynic | January 6, 2004Salon.com has an article today on Howard Ahmanson, the reclusive savings and loan heir who has spent millions to promote religious right causes in America. In addition to his enormous support of seemingly any anti-gay organizations he can find, Ahmanson is well known to those of us who are active in the evolution/creationism battle because he is the primary money man behind the Discovery Institute (DI), the Seattle-based think tank at the forefront of advocating Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC). The DI's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture is where you will find such IDC…
loom | December 30, 2003 They say that history is written by the winners, but if that's true, then natural history is written by those who can write. Our ancestors split from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 6 or 7 million years ago, and since then they've given rise to perhaps twenty known species of hominids (and potentially many more waiting to be discovered). Today only our own species survives, and only ours has acquired the intelligence to learn things about the distant past--such as the fact that we are the product of evolution. Our survival and our intelligence sometimes blur together, with the result that…
loom | December 22, 2003Evolution isn't simply about the genes you gain. It's also about the genes you lose.
The word loss has a painful, grieving sound to human ears, and so it can be hard to see how it can have anything to do with the rise of diversity and complexity in life. And until recently, evolutionary biologists didn't pay much attention to lost genes because they were preoccupied with the emergence of new ones. New genes, they found, can be produced in many ways. A gene can get accidentally duplicated, for example, and the copy can mutate, taking on a new function. Or pieces of two separate genes can get…
stcynic | December 18, 2003As someone who is very involved in the fight for quality science education in the US, nothing is more frustrating than seeing how often and how flagrantly science gets distorted in the popular media. Most Americans get what little knowledge they have of science not from scientists but from journalists and TV producers. Unfortunately, much of what passes for science in newspapers, popular magazines and on television is either drastically oversimplified, wildly exaggerated, or just plain wrong. This example caught my eye on the web.
The headline is "Evolutionary theory says self-interest…
loom | December 18, 2003Just before the winter solstice brings autumn to an end, here's a chance to blog about the great evolutionary biologist--and student of fall foliage--William Hamilton. Hamilton, who died in 2000, has never reached the household-name status of other evolutionary biologists such as E.O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould. But he deserves a place of privilege, for all his profoundly influential ideas. He found an explanation for altruistic behavior in many insect species by expanding biology's notion of fitness to include the genes an individual shares with its relatives. He offered…
loom | December 12, 2003To those who are new to my web log, thanks for checking it out. To those who have come from my old site, thanks for clicking through.
This week, while a sickly laptop robbed me of the opportunity to blog, a steady stream of interesting papers were published. Three struck me as particularly fascinating, because they illustrate the different ways evolutionary changes alter our world.
1. Scourges in waiting
When SARS failed to take hold in the United States, it was easy to feel smug about our defences against new epidemics. The nasty influenza strain now spreading across the United States…
stcynic | December 11, 2003I've long been active in the battle over the teaching of evolution in public schools. One of the arguments that we hear quite often is the "Fairness Argument". It goes like this: There are two explanations for the existence of life on earth, either life evolved by "random chance" (evolution) or it was put here by a creator (creationism or "intelligent design theory"); since neither has been "proven", it's only fair that if you're going to teach one, you should teach them both and let the kids decide. To the average person, this argument sounds eminently reasonable. Who, after all, could argue…
loom | December 3, 2003In a post last month, I pointed out how aerospace engineers can learn a lot from looking at the fossils of ancient flying reptiles. Today's issue of Nature contains a variation on that theme: ancient swimming reptiles can teach geneticists a lot as well.
Almost all humans have five fingers. Genetic disorders can produce extra fingers and toes, but only rarely. Five fingers is generally the upper limit not just for humans, but for all vertebrates on land. You can find plenty of tetrapods whose ancestors lost one or more of those five fingers. Horses have just one; snakes none. But tetrapods…
stcynic | November 28, 2003No idea in science is as controversial as the theory of evolution. The controversy comes not from within science, but in that grey area where science and religion intersect. This is an issue I've been involved with for many years. Since my late teen years, in fact. I'm part of a group that administers the Talk.Origins Archive, which is probably the largest repository of information about the evolution vs creationism battle on the web. I'm also a founder and advisory board member of Michigan Citizens for Science and have worked closely with the National Center for Science Education for many…
loom | November 26, 2003Futurepundit has an interesting post based on a new paper about so-called junk DNA. Only 2% or so of the human genome actually encodes protein sequences. The rest is a grab-bag of broken genes and virus-like sequences called mobile elements that hijack the cell's DNA copying-machinery from time to time and insert new copies of themselves back into the genome. A pair of scientists have come up with some ideas about why organisms like us have junk-rich genomes, while bacteria have barely any. I was going to post on it until pre-Thanksgiving business overwhelmed me.
After summarizing this…
loom | November 19, 2003Texas may be off the hook for now, but Razib at Gene Expression observes that some medical students at the University of Oslo are lobbying for anti-evolution lectures. I guess I'll try not to be in Norway if I need antibiotics.
loom | November 13, 2003Over the past couple years, a few pounds of rock from Australia have been the subject of a fierce scientific battle between geologists and paleontologists. Some paleontologists have claimed that microscopic marks in the 3.5 billion year old rocks are the oldest fossils of life yet found. Some geologists have recently argued that the marks are just odd mineral formations that could have been created without the help of life. Today in Science, the geologists have struck again. A team from Spain and Australia mixed up some silica, carbonate, barium, and other compounds that can be found in the…
loom | November 12, 2003Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution?
It's certainly easy to impose a march of progress on the course of evolution. That's why the sequence of apes transforming into humans as they march from left to right is so universal. Of course, there are also pictures in which Homo sapiens, having risen up to noble, upright proportions, begins to crouch back down again, until he (never a she, I've noticed) is crouching in front of a computer or a television or facing some other ignoble end. As I wrote in Parasite Rex, this anxiety--an anxiety mostly about ourselves and not about…
loom | November 7, 2003Chris Mooney, CalPundit, Signal+Noise and others have been doing a great job of keeping track of the woeful textbook battles down in Texas. The Board of Education there has been arguing over how evolution should be presented in the textbooks they're about to buy for the state's high school students. The Discovery Institute, the headquarters of "Intelligent Design" proponents, has been lobbying them hard to present their ideas on equal footing with those of evolutionary biology. It looks this morning like they've lost (again).
The conservative members of the board are disappointed--they say…
loom | November 7, 2003The other day I (among others) came down on Gregg Easterbrook for his poor grasp of science. Finding myself procrastinating today, I wandered over to his blog and had yet another good laugh. In a post today, he actually displays some interest in evolutionary biology. After discussing some work suggesting that wine might be able to prolong life, he gets into the evolution of longevity. I raised my eyebrows at this point, thinking perhaps he'd moved away from the muddled stuff he's written about evolution in the past. But then the goofiness returns.
First he describes how experiments to extend…
loom | November 4, 2003My hotel here in Wisconsin has a great high-speed connection and I have some downtime, and so I'll post on a really interesting paper that just came out that may tell us a lot about how we got so complex.
When I say "we," I'm speaking very broadly. Humans, other mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibian, and fish are all very complex, particularly compared to our closest invertebrate relatives. The picture I've attached here is of Ciona, one of these closest relatives. Little more than a small sleeve-shaped filter feeder, it's not too impressive. In particular, its body is not too complicated. It…
loom | October 29, 2003Evolution is nature's great R&D division. Through mutation, natural selection, and other processes, life can find new solutions for the challenge of staying alive. It's possible to see a simplified version of this problem solving at work in the lab. The genetic molecule RNA, for example, can evolve into shapes that allow it to do things no one ever expected RNA to do, like join together amino acids. Over millions of years, evolution can solve far bigger problems. How can a mammal became an efficient swimmer? How can a bug fly?
Humans would like to build ocean-going vehicles as efficient…
loom | October 28, 2003Loyal denizens of the blogosphere will forgive me if I begin this post by sketching out the details of the recent Gregg Easterbrook affair for those who haven't kept up with the details. Easterbook, a senior editor at the New Republic, started up a blog recently where he cranked out postings at a feverish pace about all sorts of stuff ranging from politics to religion to science. Recently, he questioned the conscience of Jewish movie executives who allowed Quentin Tarantino's movie, Kill Bill, to be made. A furor ensued, and Easterbrook lost his column with ESPN Magazine (owned by Disney, the…