evolution
evolvingthoughts | August 13, 2008
As I sit here, dying slowly and loudly from a dose of gastro and probably 'flu (Australian male: we don't do sick well), trying to distract myself from the efforts of my lower intestines to escape to Jamaica, I came across a name I recall all too well from my 1970s: Francis Schaeffer. Well, actually his son, also known as Francis (Frank) Schaeffer.
Schaeffer pére was a leading evangelical "intellectual" whose ideas and work in large part helped organise what came to be the religious right in the US, although he lived in Switzerland. He is responsible for getting across to the American…
gregladen | August 13, 2008This just in:
A federal judge has ruled the University of California can deny course credit to Christian high school graduates who have been taught with textbooks that reject evolution and declare the Bible infallible, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles ruled Friday that the school's review committees did not discriminate against Christians because of religious viewpoints when it denied credit to those taught with certain religious textbooks, but instead made a legitimate claim that the texts failed to teach critical thinking and omitted…
jrosenhouse | August 13, 2008My account of the big creationism conference will go up soon, but in the meantime you can tide yourself over with this op-ed from yesterday's New York Times. Olivia Judson explains a few of the reasons it is important to teach evolution in science classes. I especially liked this:
The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence -- or indeed, evidence of any kind -- has permeated the Bush…
awild | August 13, 2008Our first paper from the Beetle Tree of Life study has been published. Here's the citation:
Wild, A. L. & Maddison, D. R. 2008. Evaluating nuclear protein-coding genes for phylogenetic utility in beetles. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2008.05.023
My co-author David Maddison once summarized the point of the paper as "Hey guys! New genes!"
What we've done is develop lab protocols for sequencing 8 nuclear genes that should be particularly useful for inferring the evolutionary history of beetles. It's a foundational paper. We created the methods that will…
laelaps | August 12, 2008There are few things that make me as happy as being able to find an elusive reference or seemingly ephemeral bit of information, and this afternoon I am smiling. After almost giving up I have been able to locate Richard Harlan description of Basilosaurus, reprinted in his book Medical and Physical Researches, and available for free download. There's lots of other great papers in the book (particularly if you're interested in the scientific study of apes), and I certainly recommend that anyone with a love for dusty old science texts give it a look.
Stumbling across this collection of Harlan's…
razib | August 11, 2008Today I stumbled on to this article in The New York Times, In U.S., Partisan Expert Witnesses Frustrate Many, and thought of Steve Fuller; the sociologist of science who testified for the Creationists at the Dover trial. John points me to this awesome take-down of Fuller's book, Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. A nice sample:
...Newton is supposed to have "presented his mathematical physics as the divine plan that was implicitly written into the Bible [emphasis added]" (p. 54). Fuller must have access to an otherwise unknown veridical edition of the…
oracknows | August 11, 2008Look what Bora's doing with poor Professor Steve Steve:
And what's poor Charles Darwin got to do with it? No wonder Jason's looking on in bemusement--or perhaps puzzlement.
edyong | August 11, 2008Food from countries all over the world owes a lot of its flavour to a fungus. The species in question isn't one of the many edible mushrooms used for cooking, the baker's yeast that gives rise to bread, or the moulds that spread through blue cheese. It's a little known species called Fusarium semitectum and its role has only just been discovered - it's the driving force behind the fiery heat of chillies.
Chillies were one of the first plants from the New World to be domesticated and they have spread all over the world since. Just today, a quarter of the world's population has eaten…
grrlscientist | August 10, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Newton, Ian. The Migration Ecology of Birds. 2008. Academic Press. Hardbound: 976 pages. Price: $74.95 U.S. [Amazon: $67.46]. SUMMARY: An up-to-date, detailed and thorough review of bird migration.
New and…
pharyngula | August 9, 2008Another bit of distortion from Ray Comfort: he claims now that I was asked to present the very best evidence for evolution, and that all I could come up with was some "little infolding of the gut". If you've come here from Comfort's ignorance zone, here are the details of the evolution of lizards of the genus Podarcis.
What Comfort cannot comprehend is that there is no one absolute make-or-break piece of evidence for evolution — evolution is a conclusion from the totality of the evidence. There are thousands of cases that demonstrate that the principles of evolution work and are useful for…
evolvingthoughts | August 8, 2008
Kids Research Express has a pretty good summary of the issue of species and speciation, which it wouldn't hurt most people to read. Sure, they repeat the mistake about Plato and typology, but that's OK. It's for kids and nonspecialists. We can fix up their errors later when they get the basics.
gregladen | August 8, 2008Check out this podcast from the Institute for Humanist Studies.
In this month's audio podcast we are dedicating the entire program to one story. During the 1970s, P. Thomas Carroll read and transcribed hundreds of Charles Darwin's personal correspondences for research purposes. Carroll shares his story of becoming intimately familiar with the great 19th century evolutionary biologist over the course of several years and 14,000 letters.
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2008
Having blown my own trumpet, I should mention that there are a few other articles in the same edition of Biology and Philosophy (which I hadn't seen until now) on Gavrilets' view of adaptive landscapes now on Online First: Massimo Pigliucci has a very nice historical summary of Sewall Wright's initial metaphor and ideas and how they changed (it hadn't occurred to me, but should have, that the landscape metaphor fails to deal with new mutations, which change the landscape itself (although I did say something like this in my 1998 paper). Anya Plutinski discusses the iconography of Wright's…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2008
I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I will ignore the layers of irony that the naming of a spider for a fictional conservative offers to semantic strip mining, and discuss the species concept that Jason Bond ("Bond. Jason Bond") and his collaborator Amy Stockman used to identify and discriminate these species. But first, here's the interview (or "sketch", as the Colbert writers call it) between Colbert and Bond (which I can't access…
clock | August 7, 2008On Tuesday night, when I posted my personal picks from this week's crop of articles published in PLoS ONE, I omitted (due to a technical glitch on the site), to point out that a blog-friend of mine John Logsdon published his first PLoS ONE paper on that day:
It's a updated and detailed report on the ongoing work in my lab to generate and curate an "inventory" of genes involved in meiosis that are present across major eukaryotic lineages. This paper focuses on the protist, Trichomonas vaginalis, an organism not known to have a sexual phase in its life cycle.
Here is the paper (and check John's…
evolvingthoughts | August 6, 2008
Wilkins, J.S. (2008). The adaptive landscape of science. Biology & Philosophy. DOI: 10.1007/s10539-008-9125-y
This is a paper returning to my roots - the evolutionary view of scientific theory change. My first paper, back in the Jurassic, was a rough and ready attempt to make sense of David Hull's view of science as a semantic conception of theories. In the light of problems such as suboptimality in evolution, many people decided that science could not be just an evolutionary (in the sense of selectionist) process because science did not require the sort of random wanderings in order…
razib | August 6, 2008Richard Dawkins: Muslim parents 'import creationism' into schools:
"Most devout Muslims are creationists so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught," Prof Dawkins said in a Sunday newspaper interview.
"Teachers are bending over backwards to respect home prejudices that children have been brought up with. The Government could do more, but it doesn't want to because it is fanatical about multiculturalism and the need to respect the different traditions from which these children come."
Fact: a greater proportion of…
clock | August 6, 2008Not on US television (Channel 4 in the UK only):
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
[Via]
pharyngula | August 6, 2008It's on the internets. The opening is something that I can't imagine flying by on American television: he simply says that evolution is a vastly superior explanation to anything religion has ever provided.
clock | August 6, 2008Since this article came out in The American Scientist (the only pop-sci magazine that IMHO has not gone downhill in quality over the past decade) in early 1999 (you can read the entire thing here (pdf)) I have read it many times, I used it in teaching, I discussed it in Journal Clubs, and it is a never-ending fascination for me. Now Andrew and Greg point out there is YouTube video about the fox domestication project:
Back in the 1950s, Dmitri Konstantinovich Belyaev started an experiment in which he selectively bred Silver Foxes, very carefully, ONLY for their tameness (and "tameness" was…