evolution
pharyngula | May 14, 2014This is the paper to read: Palazzo & Gregory's The Case for Junk DNA. It clearly and logically lays out the complete argument from evidence and theory for the thesis that most of the genome is junk. It's not revolutionary or radical, though: the whole story is based on very fundamental population genetics and molecular biology, and many decades of accumulated observations. And once you know a little bit of those disciplines -- you don't need to be a genius with a great depth of understanding -- the conclusion is both obvious and in some ways, rather trivial.
Here's that conclusion:
For…
pharyngula | April 25, 2014We've had a creationist named "biasevolution" babbling away in the comments. He's not very bright and he's longwinded, always a disastrous combination, and he tends to echo tedious creationist tropes that have been demolished many times before. But hey, I'm indefatigable, I can hammer at these things all day long.
He brings up irreducible complexity (IC), Behe's ever-popular contribution to the creationism debate. Behe's version of the idea was published in 1996, so we've had almost 20 years to refute it -- successfully! -- so it gets a little old seeing it brought up again and again.
If you…
gregladen | April 17, 2014You will recall that last February, Bill Nye, the Science Guy, debated Ken Ham, the Not-So-Science Guy, on the question of creationism as a viable explanation for the Earth's history. The debate was held in Ham's home territory, at the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky. Nye didn't really debate Ham. He ate him for breakfast. Form now on we shall call him Ken Bacon and Eggs.
Anyway, people, including me, who have been engaged with the "debate" between science (evolution) and not-so-science (creationism of one kind or another) were very concerned when we heard that this debate might…
pharyngula | April 15, 2014He hates Tiktaalik. He hates it so much he even has a hard time spelling its name correctly.
Tikaalik is again being popularized through the new PBS series "Your Inner Fish.'' it's really a desperate con job on the part of evolutionists who can't defend their evolutionary fictional story.
He actually surprises me a little bit: one of his arguments that it can't possibly be a transitional form is that it is only a fossil. That's one I hadn't heard before. So extinct species can't be evidence for evolution anymore, because only living species count?
Because it belongs to the group of lobe…
sa smith | April 15, 2014Via John Wilkins and John Farrell:
A Simple Visualization of How Species Evolve
This is basically my dissertation, animated. LOL!!
What are you looking at?
Every pixel in that square is a genetic sequence. Some of those sequences confer a higher fitness advantage (the red colored peaks) or disadvantage (below the plane). The Blue color is neutral.
The grey dots are individual organisms within a population (the swarm of grey dots). The population does not explore every inch of the landscape at the same time (not every human alive right now represents all potential human DNA combinations). But…
dr. dolittle | March 30, 2014Check out this neat video highlighting how frog-eating bats are using frog mating calls to know where to pick up dinner:
milhayser | March 23, 2014For the first time, researchers have transformed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into specialized bladder cells. Meanwhile the development of iPSCs from normal cells has been shown to depend on two proteins necessary for the induction of a glycolytic state. In order to make iPSCs, researchers have previously needed to collect significant amounts of skin, bone marrow, or blood from a donor, but researchers have demonstrated a new method that requires only a single drop of blood. In the future, you may be able to prick your finger, send a drop of blood to the lab, and have them grow a…
pharyngula | March 13, 2014I was looking over the Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views site, prior to forgetting about it. I mentioned that I am forced to revamp my email handling and was going to be blocking a lot of noise from my work address, and as I was reviewing what domains I needed to allow through, I noticed that boy-howdy, I get a lot of crappy spam from the Discovery Institute (all of which is now getting blocked). So I actually bothered to go through one of their links and see what they're babbling about now.
General impression: the Discovery Institute is really obsessed with Cosmos: A Spacetime…
sa smith | March 12, 2014More HIV news!
HIVs ancestor, SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus), has been around a LOT longer than we previously thought.
As I have mentioned before, we always assumed retroviruses like HIV, lentiviruses, are evolutionarily 'young'. They are relatively complex, so probably 'newish' in retrovirus-world, but they do not fossilize well (we have found very few lentiviral ERVs), so it has been hard to elucidate HIVs ancient genealogy.
Several years ago, researchers used an isolated colony of primates to estimate SIVs age at 32,821-132,780 years old.
Well, HIVs ancestors just got older... er!…
gregladen | February 18, 2014Every year the Twin Cities Creation Science Association puts on a science fair which is sometimes called the Home Schooling Creation Science Fair. It used to be held at Har Mar mall, which was great because it is always a pleasure to stop in at Har Mar. But for the last two years, including last weekend, it was held at a local Bible College. I haven't gone every year, but most years, as does The Lorax at Angry By Choice and a variable handful of others. This year, PZ Myers also attended. (Speaking of PZ I just noticed that his book is now available as an audio edition, just so you know.)…
pharyngula | February 14, 2014I was rather surprised yesterday to see so much negative reaction to my statement that there's more to evolution than selection, and that random, not selective, changes dominate our history. It was in the context of what should be taught in our public schools, and I almost bought the line that we can only teach a simplified version of evolution in grade school, but then it sunk in that I was talking to a group of adults about the standard biological perspective, and their reactions were a mix of total bafflement, indignant rejection, and strange evasive waffling. Well, when should we talk…
milhayser | February 13, 2014As an alternative to biblical creationism, Intelligent Design infers a less obtrusive God to explain life on Earth. This deity doesn't hurl bolts of lightning, unless it's with the express purpose of sparking abiogenesis in the primordial soup. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse dismisses probabilistic arguments against the likelihood of complex organisms, explaining that even the most improbable-seeming outcome of natural selection is more or less inevitable. As a flawed analogy, he imagines flipping a coin 500 times. This will always manifest a sequence of heads and tails that only had a…
gregladen | February 13, 2014Not work safe especially if you work in a church:
2+2=5. Slap. Oh sorry.
This blog does not endorse all of the methods used in this video. But this blog did ROFLMAO.
Hat tip Bunny.
gregladen | February 5, 2014Bill Nye "The Science Guy" went to the Creation Museum to debate "is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era?" After the debate, Bill Nye came to the Last Word to discuss his faceoff with the founder of the Creation Museum, Ken Ham.
Nye said he accepted the debate challenge because the spread of creationism "frightens" him. "I don't think I'm going to win Mr. Ham over any more than Mr. Ham thinks he's going to win me over," Nye said. "Instead, I want to show people that this belief is still among us. It finds its way onto school boards in the United States."
Ham,…
gregladen | February 5, 2014In the Spring of 2010, evangelical Bible scholar Bruce Waltke, in speaking about the overwhelming evidence for evolution, said “To deny that reality will make us a cult, some odd group that is not really interacting with the real world.”
In response to this, Ken Ham, president of Kentucky’s Creation Museum, commented, “What he is saying ultimately undermines the authority of God’s word.”
Both statements seem to be true. (I don’t think you necessarily need to have faith in a god to accept the basic logic of Ham’s statement.) Also, that’s really all you need to know about young earth…
sa smith | January 15, 2014Though this paper (the one I began talking about before a holiday break) is the reason for this post, this post is also an opportunity to address a question I have gotten a lot over the years:
Is HIV evolving to be more deadly?
The short answer would be: No, it doesnt appear to be. Scientists have battled 'new' HIV variants vs 'old' HIV variants, and the younger variants are no more aggressive than the older versions.
Replicative fitness of historical and recent HIV-1 isolates suggests HIV-1 attenuation over time
The findings of this paper are, unquestionably, limited. They only looked in a…
oracknows | January 5, 2014Believe it or not, even your ever-lovin' box of colored blinking lights can malfunction, and it happened to me over the weekend. Actually, sometime around New Years, I caught some sort of crud, and have been battling it since. There's nothing like hacking up a lung and not being able to sleep well for days to put one in a perfect mood to be particularly Insolent. And so it would have been, until my part of the country managed to be buried in snow all day and night Sunday, necessitating multiple rounds of going out to use the snow blower in spite of my condition and having to get up super…
esiegel | December 27, 2013"Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." -Dream Hampton
Perhaps no word in the English language generates as much misunderstanding as the word theory. In scientific circles, this word has a very specific meaning that's different from everyday use, and -- as a theoretical astrophysicist myself -- I feel it's my duty to help explain exactly what we mean when we use it. In this week’s Ask Ethan column, I'm pleased to pull out of our question/suggestion box the question of Ripley, who asks:
I often see that because there is no "100…
sa smith | December 19, 2013Some people have emailed me this story, concerned about the evolution of a 'recombinant' HIV virus that makes people progress to AIDS much faster than 'regular' HIV.
Scientists Find Aggressive New HIV Strain
This is the paper they are referring to:
Faster Progression to AIDS and AIDS-Related Death Among Seroincident Individuals Infected With Recombinant HIV-1 A3/CRF02_AG Compared With Sub-subtype A3
There is a lot to address here, so I am going to break it up into a few posts.
What are 'recombinant viruses'? Are they some new scary development in HIV/AIDS?
There are lots of different '…