evolution
emjohnson | August 27, 2009Well, not really. He just wants to sell some books there. But don't tell that to the editors at The Times.
None of Professor Dawkins' books, on evolution as well as religion, has ever been translated into Arabic, and his work has been heavily censored in Turkey. In an interview with The Times, he said that popularising evolution in the Islamic world, where creationist beliefs are strong, was a challenge he is keen to take up. "To be a bestseller in a Muslim country would be a personal triumph," he said.
Last year, the Islamic creationist Harun Yahya (aka Adnan Oktar) successfully had…
razib | August 26, 2009There's a new National Geographic special out, The Human Family Tree, which readers might be interested in. Next showing is on the 30th. Seems to be an extension of The Genographic Project.
Clips below the fold:
clock | August 26, 2009From NESCent:
> "Re: Design" - This is a dramatization of the scientific correspondence between Charles Darwin and botanist Asa Gray, and is a product of the Darwin Correspondence Project. NESCent is co-sponsoring this theatrical production with the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, WUNC-TV and the NCSU Theater Dept. The production will be staged at the newly renovated Thompson Hall theater at NCSU, and will employ professional actors (not undergrads!) so it should be a really high-quality production. It will run for five days (Nov. 4th through 8th), with the first four days being 8 PM…
mikethemadbiologist | August 26, 2009You might find it hard to believe, but determining whether restricting antibiotic use leads to decreased resistance is actually not very straightforward. That's because antibiotic resistance genes can be linked to--that is, they travel along with--other resistance genes or even genes that are favored for some other reason. So even when an antibiotic is no longer used, the use of other antibiotics (or other antibacterials such as quarternary ammonium compounds or colloidal silver) can keep these genes around.
But quinolone antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin ("Cipro"), which are used to treat…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I'm possibly stepping into proverbial lion's den with this one, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn't like…
razib | August 25, 2009Kambiz Kamrani of Anthropology, normally a rather staid blogger, has posted something titled Science Suffers From The Idiots At Scientific American. It's in reference to this widely circulated editorial, Fossils for All: Science Suffers by Hoarding. I can't really summarize it, and I think the title certainly does invite you to read the whole post at Anthropology.net
gregladen | August 25, 2009There many ways of dividing up and categorizing Natural Selection. For example, there are the trichotomies of Natural Selection, Sexual Selection and Artificial Selection, and Modes of Selection (Stabilizing, Directional, and Disruptive) trichotomy.
We sense that these are good because they are "threes" and "three" is a magic number. Here, I'm focusing on the Mode Trichotomy, and asking that we consider that there are not three, but four modes of Natural Selection. This will cause tremors throughout the Evolutionary Theory community because Four is not a magic number, but so be it.
In…
gregladen | August 25, 2009Natural Selection is the key creative force in evolution. Natural selection, together with specific histories of populations (species) and adaptations, is responsible for the design of organisms. Most people have some idea of what Natural Selection is. However, it is easy to make conceptual errors when thinking about this important force of nature. One way to improve how we think about a concept like this is to carefully exam its formal definition.
In this post, we will do the following:
Discuss historical and contextual aspects of the term "Natural Selection" in order to make clear…
pharyngula | August 25, 2009
Since I just chastised the misleading presentation of this paper in the press (and I must emphasize that the odd focus on Darwin is not in the paper at all), we can now take a closer look at the paper itself. The data is actually cool to see, and represents a large amount of work; I still have some criticisms for the interpretation, though. The fundamental question is whether the structure of the appendix was specifically selected for, and the authors are on the side of 'yes'. I'll come down on the side of 'maybe'.
But first, an important caveat. Creationists have long been yammering about…
razib | August 25, 2009Speaking of Richard Dawkins, he's back to science, in this case an excerpt from his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution:
The evolution of the dog, then, if Coppinger is right, was not just a matter of artificial selection, but a complicated mixture of natural selection (which predominated in the early stages of domestication) and artificial selection (which came to the fore more recently). The transition would have been seamless, which again goes to emphasise the similarity -- as Darwin recognised -- between artificial and natural selection.
Nothing new in the…
gregladen | August 24, 2009Another look at falsehoods about evolution.
We previously addressed the falsehood "Evolution has stopped for humans" and concluded that background change in allele frequency independent of natural selection does not just stop for any viable, continuing population. So, no, saying that "evolution has stopped for humans" is tantamount to saying that "gravity has stopped for my coffee cup" (which is sitting here on my desk minding its own business).
But this question is a falsehood at another level. In reality, there are two additional questions that are actually being asked when this…
razib | August 24, 2009
A month ago Larry Moran made reference to Fern Elsdon Baker's new book, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy. Moran was a bit disappointed by the previews, his pet hobby-horse being the revolutionary impact of the neutral theory of molecular evolution, while Elsdon-Baker seems rather fixated on the potential of Neo-Lamarckism, especially epigenetics. Well, I've read the book, and Larry Moran would probably be disappointed, though she mentions Stephen Jay Gould and pluralism a bit, there's really very little engagement with the 20th century debates in evolutionary…
grrlscientist | August 23, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
pharyngula | August 22, 2009
Last night, I asked for a copy of an article (I have plenty now, thanks!) that was getting a lot of press. The reason I was looking for it is two-fold: the PR looked awful, expressing some annoying cliches about evolution, but the data looked interesting, good stuff that I was glad to see done. Awful and interesting — I'm a sucker for those jarring combinations. My favorite pizza is jalapeno and pineapple, too.
I'm going to split my discussion of this article in two, just to simplify dealing with it. This is the awful part. I'll do the interesting part a little later.
The paper is about the…
gregladen | August 21, 2009In my initial list of Falsehoods, I included these two closely related items:
Evolution has stopped for humans; and
Serious scientists often entertain the question: "Has evolution stopped for humans?"
I'll make the distinction between them clear eventually. For now, let's focus on the first: Has evolution stopped for humans or not?
The reason we bring up these falsehoods to begin with is because examining them exposes assumptions or requires the investigation of knowledge that is worth talking about. In this case, the deeper question is this: What is evolution exactly? So, this is a…
edyong | August 21, 2009Viruses and bacteria often act as parasites, infecting a host, reproducing at its expense and causing disease and death. But not always - sometimes, their infections are positively beneficial and on rare occasions, they can actually defend their hosts from parasitism rather than playing the role themselves.
In the body of one species of aphid, a bacterium and a virus have formed a unlikely partnership to defend their host from a lethal wasp called Aphidius ervi. The wasp turns aphids into living larders for its larvae, laying eggs inside unfortunate animals that are eventually eaten from…
razib | August 20, 2009Thomas Mailund on Doubts about complex speciation between humans and chimpanzees:
Two patterns from large-scale DNA sequence data have been put forward as evidence that speciation between humans and chimpanzees was complex, involving hybridization and strong selection. First, divergence between humans and chimpanzees varies considerably across the autosomes. Second, divergence between humans and chimpanzees (but not gorillas) is markedly lower on the X chromosome. Here, we describe how simple speciation and neutral molecular evolution explain both patterns. In particular, the wide range in…
razib | August 20, 2009How inevitable was modern human civilization - data:
To me it looks like life, animals with nervous systems, Upper Paleolithic-style Homo, language, and behavioral modernity were all extremely unlikely events (notice how far ago they are - vaguely ~3.5bln, ~600mln, ~3mln, ~200k or ~600k, ~50k years ago) - except perhaps language and behavioral modernity might have been linked with each other, if language was relatively late (Homo sapiens only) and behavioral modernity more gradual (and its apparent suddenness is an artifact). Once we have behavioral modernity, modern civilization seems almost…
Charles Darwin Lecture Series - Dale Russell: "Islands in the Cosmos: The Evolution of Life on Land"
clock | August 20, 2009DARWIN LECTURE SERIES CONTINUES!
How did we come to be here? Answers to this question have preoccupied
humans for millennia. Scientists have sought clues in the genes of
living things, in the physical environments of Earth - from mountaintops
to the depths of the ocean, in the chemistry of this world and those
nearby, in the tiniest particles of matter, and in the deepest reaches
of space. On Tuesday, September 29, Senior Curator of Paleontology Dale
Russell presents a talk based on his new book "Islands in the Cosmos:
The Evolution of Life on Land," which follows evolution from its origins…
sa smith | August 18, 2009I read a nice review article on viral evilution this weekend that really highlighted, for me, how clueless Creationists (especially Intelligent Design Creationists) are about evilution.
Antiviral resistance and impact on viral replication capacity: evolution of viruses under antiviral pressure occurs in three phases.
As we saw the last time IDiots tried to talk about HIV-1, Their Arguments Regarding Design focus on mutations rates-- HIV needs to make X mutations to escape a drug, HIV needs to make Y mutations to become climb a fitness peak, etc.
What theyre talking about (what theyre clueless…