evolution
evolvingthoughts | March 7, 2009Archetype is a blog on stuff I like, including taxonomy and entomology. It's by Roberto Keller, a graduate of AMNH and Cornell. Go check it out. Some nice stuff on homologies in insects.
sa smith | March 7, 2009Chelsea: Hey, Scott just called.
Me: ... Yeah...?
Chelsea: Were on the volunteer list.
Me: $^&#(&!! I never got an email from that chick telling us what to do! I thought they didnt want us?!?!
Chelsea: Me too... But we might as well go get a free T-shirt!
Me: FREE T-SHIRT! Ill be in Norman in 15 minutes!
When I got to Norman, I was expecting a circus.
Instead I was greeted by several hundred people casually standing in line, happily chatting with new friends about our dip-shit legislators, having a grand ol time.
So my 'volunteer' duties consisted of doing what I do best: Being…
evolvingthoughts | March 6, 2009There's been a highly publicised conference at the Vatican about evolution. There are good and sensible things being said there, and silly ones.
The good and sensible things are that nobody questions that evolution occurs, and it is asserted that faith and science cannot conflict (which means, therefore, that faith will have to adapt to science, since science changes only in response to the evidence).
The less sensible things are that evolution is not the cause of atheism, and that those, specifically mentioning Dawkins, who claim that it does are being "scientistic", that is, practising…
palmd | March 6, 2009If someone were to write a biography of the Creationist neurosurgeon, "Unhinged" would be an apt title. He used to content himself with rants against philosophical materialism, and evangelize for dualism with a zealous religiosity. But that wasn't enough. The "forces of secularism" seemed to keep growing, despite his desire to see some heavenly smiting. In his latest rants, the gloves are off---it's scalpels at twenty paces.
Let's see what's got Egnor so exercised.
First came the announcement by Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) that they would boycott Louisiana…
jlynch | March 6, 2009This being the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth - and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterwork - many folks seem to have the goal of reading Origin for the first time. Generally speaking the first edition of 1859 (or the second of 1860) is taken as the best edition to begin with - in later editions Darwin muddies his ideas in response to critics and it becomes increasingly difficult to clearly delineate what “Darwinism” entails.
David Quammen has produced a very nice edition of Origin that relies on the first edition for its text but supplements it with extracts from The…
cmooney | March 6, 2009A lot of people right now are striving desperately to establish this notion. Neil Munro's big story in the latest National Journal (here, subscription) is the latest example. In essence, it postulates a bunch of new rifts that are going to open between scientists and Democrats now that the latter are in power. I'm quoted in there with this comment:
"There is not going to be enough money to go around, so there will be a lot of scientific priorities that will be hard to meet," Mooney said. But, "I don't think it's going to be the same adversarial situation [seen in the Bush years]. Very few or…
edyong | March 5, 2009The world of genetics is filled with stories that are as gripping as the plot of any thriller. Take the IRGM gene - its saga, played out over millions of years, has all the makings of a classic drama. Act One: setting the scene. By duplicating and diverging, this gene thrived in the cells of most mammals as a trinity of related versions that played vital roles in the immune system.
Act Two: tragedy strikes. About 50 million years ago, in the ancestors of today's apes and monkeys, the entire IRGM cluster was practically deleted, leaving behind a sole survivor. Things took a turn for the worse…
pharyngula | March 5, 2009He was probably able to get home before midnight last night. You can now read his description of the social events around Dawkins' visit, and a much more thorough account of the talk itself.
One other point that I should emphasize. This talk presented an overview of how we should look at the appearance of design in the universe, for a general public. While I heard some complaints that there was nothing new in it, that's the way this had to be: it was a synthesis of a position.
Dawkins is often given a rap as one of those ultradarwinians who see every detail of life as the explicit product of…
pharyngula | March 5, 2009I may be getting too old for this.
Yesterday, I finished up teaching at 1 in the afternoon, then had to leap into the Pharyngulamobile and drive, drive, drive to Minneapolis. I got together with Lynn Fellman and Greg Laden for a hasty dinner before I had to go move my car and park prior to Richard Dawkins' talk. This was almost a disaster; it turns out that last night, at the same time as the talk, there was a basketball game scheduled. The streets were packed, parking was a nightmare, and I only got to Northrop Auditorium with a whisker of time to spare. Many of the attendees seem to have…
evolvingthoughts | March 4, 2009Darwin's Dangerous Idea, according to Daniel Dennett in the book by that name, is natural selection. This is often referred to as "Darwin's theory". But Darwin did not always think evolutionary events or processes were due to natural selection.
First off, let's say this again: Darwin did not think that evolution was due to chance. His mechanism of evolution was not "random chance", as Behe and others have asserted. He believed that variation was not correlated with fitness, yes, and occurred in ways that are statistically distributed (a conception not available until Galton came up with the…
edyong | March 4, 2009Earlier this year, I wrote about how the human obsession with size is reshaping the bodies of other species at an incredible pace. Unlike natural predators that cull the sick, weak and unfit, human fishermen prize the biggest catches and throw the smallest ones back in.
As a result, fish and other species harvested by humans are shrinking, often within a few generations, and are becoming sexually mature at an earlier stage. These changes are bad news for populations as a whole, for smaller individuals often have lower odds of survival and produce fewer offspring.
But David Conover from…
laelaps | March 3, 2009I had initially intended to write this post to coincide with my birthday last week but my research unexpectedly set me on the trail of Saartje Baartman. Below is the essay I had originally set out to write;
What to do about Charles Lyell? In September of 1859 he had announced to the scientists assembled at the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting that , contrary to previous belief, "it [was] probable that man was old enough to have coexisted, at least, with the Siberian mammoth." He also knew that the arrival of Charles Darwin's abstract on evolution by natural…
evolvingthoughts | March 1, 2009William Smellie wrote The Philosophy of Natural History in 1791, and it remained in print for over a century. It's a lovely and explicit expression of the Great Chain of Being view that all things grade insensibly from simple to perfect, and all classifications are arbitrary. This was effectively the last time in which someone could argue that from within natural history itself. I transcribe the whole chapter below the fold (it's a great way to engage the text in detail):
From Smellie, William. 1791. The philosophy of natural history. Philadelphia: Robert Campbell, pp463-469.
CHAPTER XXII.
Of…
ddobbs | March 1, 2009Matthew Nisbet says maybe, but not by much.
I
n the U.S., there is often the false assumption that Europeans are somehow more engaged and supportive of science than Americans. Yet, as I discuss in several studies and as I have written about in articles, instead of science literacy, the same generalizable interaction between values, social identity, and media portrayals drive European perceptions of science debates. Indeed, cross-national survey studies show that while science remains the most widely admired and respected institution in American society, Europeans are far more ambivalent…
evolvingthoughts | March 1, 2009Actually, this one is better called "Darwin was a racist", but as the text concerned is from the same source as those claims, I thought it might be easier to evaluate a single claim and generalise from that.
Our gospel for today is chapters V and VI of The Descent of Man, published in 1871.
If you read Darwin sloppily, or to find evidence that he really was a Very Bad Man for rhetorical - usually religious - purposes, you soon come across this statement. In fact, you can find paraphrases of it in literally hundreds of creationist documents and sites. Here is the offending passage, from…
grrlscientist | March 1, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
razib | February 28, 2009You can watch me talk to Greg Cochran about his book The 10,000 Year Explosion on bloggingheads.tv this weekend....
There's something interesting about the front page of bloggingheads.tv right now.
Check it. Not only are the two colored people on the front not talking to each other (yeah, I'm talking about the Glenn & John duo), but both happen to be secular Bangladeshi American Republican males. Who have met each other to boot. Conspiracy? Or coincidence? You decide.
gregladen | February 27, 2009Perhaps we are all subject to falling into the trap of what I call the Hydraulic Theory of Everything. If you eat more you will be bigger, if you eat less you will be smaller. Emotional states are the continuously varying outcome of different levels of a set of hormones, forming "happy" or "stressy" or "angry" cocktails. Your brain is a vessel into which life pours various elixirs. Too much of one thing, and there will not be enough room for something else. Even political arguments are hydraulic. The 'balanced' middle view between two arguments is like the mixture of contrasting primary…
jrosenhouse | February 27, 2009Writing at Christian Today Tony Campolo has unleashed a stunningly stupid barrage of attacks against Charles Darwin.
Campolo is a bit of a celebrity among the evangelical left. He can thump his Bible with the best of them, but also defends progressive political positions. That he is usually a rare voice of political moderation in an ocean of evangelical narrow-mindedness makes this essay especially disappointing. We consider his essay in full.
Campolo begins:
Many supporters of the principle of separation of church and state say that the Intelligent Design Theory of creation ought not…
sheril | February 27, 2009Mark your calendars for the launch of ASU's new Origins Initiative on April 6, 2009. Tickets go on sale next week and the event will be broadcast live online. It looks like a terrific line up including Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Brian Greene, and new Director, (and Science Debate co-founder) Lawrence Krauss.
The Origins Symposium will inaugurate the new Origins Initiative at ASU, which will be a University-wide transdisciplinary endeavor supporting research building on key areas of strength at ASU including: the origin of the universe, origins of stars and planet, the origins of life,…