evolution
stcynic | July 7, 2004If you have not checked out the Panda's Thumb, I recommend starting with this post by Ian Musgrave. It is a devestating critique of an article by Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Witt. Ian is an Australian biochemist and he simply shreds Witt's arguments against the argument from jury-rigged design. It is an appropriate venue for such an article, since the "panda's thumb" is a textbook example of how evolution cobbles together useful structures out of existing ones, as would be expected. If an omnipotent designer had started from scratch, it would certainly have done a better job of it…
loom | July 7, 2004Could test tube babies be revealing some of the hidden workings of evolution? It's a definite possibility, judging from some recent reports about the balance of males and females.
For several decades, evolutionary biologists have been trying to figure out the forces that set this balance. It appears that they come down to a tug of war between competing interests. Imagine a species in which a freakish mutation makes the females gives birth to lots and lots of daughters. If you're a male, suddenly your chances of reproducing look very good--certainly better than all those females. Now imagine…
loom | July 5, 2004Recently I've been trying to imagine a world without leaves. It's not easy to do at this time of year, when the trees around my house turn my windows into green walls. But a paper published on-line today at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science inspires some effort. A team of English scientists offer a look back at Earth some 400 million years ago, at a time before leaves had evolved. Plants had been growing on dry land for at least 75 million years, but they were little more than mosses and liverworts growing on damp ground, along with some primitive vascular plants with stems a…
stcynic | July 2, 2004Ernst Mayr, one of the true giants of science, is now 100 years old and still very active as a teacher and writer. In the latest issue of Science, he has a retrospective on his 80 years of work in evolutionary biology. He was one of the primary architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis that united diverse and contradictory theories of evolution under one theory that has stood the tests of time. Three cheers for the grand old man of evolution. May we still be talking about his astounding body of work in another 100 years.
loom | July 2, 2004In 1970, the natural history illustrator Rudolph Zallinger painted a picture of human evolution called "The March of Progress" in which a parade of hominids walked along from left to right, evolving from knuckle-walking ape to tall, spear-carrying Cro-Magnon. The picture is etched in our collective consciousness, making it possible for cartoonists to draw pictures like the one here safe in the knowledge that we'll all get the joke. I had actually wanted to show Zallinger's own picture, but, like others before me, I failed to find it on the web. I was inspired to hunt down the picture by the…
loom | June 21, 2004We like to think of boundaries as being clear-cut borders, but at least in the biological world they generally turn out to be fuzzy zones of change. The line between land and sea is my own favorite example. Last summer my wife and I would sometimes take our oldest daughter Charlotte to the beach. At the time she was a year old and refused to put her toe in the water. This summer she heads straight in, but only about up to her knees. She runs back out and goes back in, repeating the circuit a few dozen times. Next year, I still expect to see her chin above the water line. In her own tadpoling…
stcynic | June 21, 2004I didn't know that the men's movement had blogs until I received an e-mail this weekend from Vic (aka David) with a link to one. The subject of the blog entry, much to my surprise, was evolution and the ID movement. Is there some connection between the men's movement and the ID movement? Many of the same people who are anti-evolution are also strongly anti-feminist, so I suppose there might be, but it still seems a bit out of place. Unfortunately, the author of this blog has no permanent links to specific posts, so you'll just have to scroll down till you find the title Intellectuals Who…
loom | June 16, 2004Love demands an explanation. Less than 5% of mammal species live monogamously, with males and females staying together beyond mating, and fathers helping mothers care for babies. We humans aren't the most monogamous species of the bunch, but we're closer to that end of the spectrum than the other end, where mating is little more than ships bumping into each other in the night.
A biological explanation for love--as with any biological explanation--has two levels. On one level are the molecular circuits that produce love, and on another level are the evolutionary forces that favor the…
stcynic | June 8, 2004One of the issues involved in the evolution/creationism battle is the question of demarcation - what separates science from non-science? One of the most popular and, in my view, compelling arguments against Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC) is that it is not a genuine scientific theory at all because it has none of the hallmarks of science. The most commonly stated requirements of a scientific theory or model is that it must meet three criteria:
A. It must be testable
B. It must be falsifiable
C. It must have explanatory power
While the means of testing a theory changes depending on the…
stcynic | June 7, 2004From my colleague Glenn Branch, the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a new article assessing the latest anti-evolution strategies being thrown at school boards around the nation. The ID crowd, who are as good at public relations as they are bad at doing science, have come up with slogan "teach the controversy" to sell their snake oil, and it's a compelling turn of phrase. But like all catchphrases, it hides a much deeper reality. As Glenn points out,As a would-be intellectually respectable form of anti-evolutionism, intelligent design is not without its successes…
loom | June 1, 2004Do you know who George Williams is? If you don't, let me introduce you to one of the most influential evolutionary biologists ever to ponder natural selection. If you do know who he is, you may still be interested in my article in this week's Science about a symposium that was recently held in Williams's honor. Scientists studying everything from pregnancy to economic decision making explained how Williams's remarkably clear thinking about the nature of adaptation helped them in their research.
A pdf of the article is also available.
loom | May 4, 2004Jack Szostak, a scientist at Harvard Medical School, is trying to build a new kind of life. It will contain no DNA or proteins. Instead, it will based on RNA, a surprisingly mysterious molecule essential to our own cells. Szostak may reach his goal in a few years. But his creatures wouldn't be entirely new. It's likely that RNA-based life was the first life to exist on Earth, some 4 billion years ago, eventually giving rise to the DNA-based life we know. It just took a clever species like our own to recreate it.
My cover story in the June issue of Discover has all the details.
stcynic | May 4, 2004Charles Colson, the Nixon co-conspirator turned Christian apologist, can quite often be seen shoveling out nonsense on evolution on his website and in books, but I think this opinion piece may take the cake. His commentary is a follow up on this one by Roberto Rivera, and the subject of both articles is the survival of the giant pandas. Their survival, as anyone who has paid attention knows, is in serious jeopardy right now, with experts estimating that there are less than 1500 left in the world. Zoologists and biologists around the world are very concerned about this and there are projects…
loom | May 3, 2004On the east coast, we're bracing for the howling emergence of a massive brood of 17-year cicadas in a couple weeks. Here's a nice piece in the Washington Post about the evolution of this strange life history.
stcynic | April 28, 2004Yet again, some intrepid explorers are preparing to trudge up Mt. Ararat to find Noah's Ark:A joint U.S.-Turkish team of 10 explorers plans to make the arduous trek up Turkeys tallest mountain, at 17,820 feet (5,430 meters), from July 15 to Aug. 15, subject to the approval of the Turkish government, said Daniel P. McGivern, president of ShamrockThe Trinity Corp. of Honolulu, Hawaii.
The goal: to enter what they believe to be a mammoth structure some 45 feet high, 75 feet wide and up to 450 feet long (14 by 23 by 138 meters) that was exposed in part by last summers heat wave in Europe.
I'll…
loom | April 22, 2004There are only a few places on the surface of Earth where you can find really old rocks--and by old, I mean 3.5 billion years old or older. The rest have gotten sucked down into the planet's interior, cooked, scrambled with other rocks, and pushed back up to the growing margins of continental plates. The few formations that have survived are mere fragments, some the size of a football field, some a house. And generally they're are mess, shot through with confusion such as intrusions of lava from more recent volcanoes. Paleontologists are drawn and repulsed by these rocks, because they may…
loom | April 21, 2004John Maynard Smith has died.
While many people know who Stephen Jay Gould was or Richard Dawkins is, Id bet few would be able to identify Maynard Smith. Thats a shame, because he played a key role in building the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. (Underlining this point, I only learned about his death from Science's online new service. As far as I can tell, no one else has run an obituary.)
Maynard Smith came to evolution from a previous career as an engineer. In World War II he measured the stress on airplane wings. When he moved to evolution, he brought with him a gift to see the…
stcynic | April 7, 2004Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has jumped into the Leiter/VanDyke fray, in a post filled with misconceptions and illogical statements. He begins:For a legal scholar and professor of philosophy, Brian Leiter has a remarkably poor grasp of basic logic. For the past week Leiter has been bashing a defender of Intelligent Design theory using his typical rhetorical style of bullying and bluster. Instead of thinking up creative new ad hominem attacks, though, he should be paying closer attention to his reasoning.
At the risk of being pedantic, I have to point out this very common mistake in…
stcynic | April 6, 2004Brian Leiter has replied to VanDyke's latest response, posted on Ex Parte and as a comment here, and it is a devestating reply, to be sure. I was hoping Brian would get around to doing this, mostly because I've been too busy to do it myself. The misuse, probably born of misunderstanding and trusting Beckwith's portrayal, of Laudan, Kuhn and other philosophers of science and their positions on methodological naturalism, fairly screamed out from VanDyke's reply and Leiter corrects the misconceptions very well.
VanDyke gets himself into particular trouble, I think, with this smug citation of…
stcynic | April 5, 2004This is becoming a regular series, isn't it? It wasn't intended as such. Rusty's latest salvo deals with a couple of questions. It started with his post concerning the Understanding Evolution website, and one section of that site in particular, which advised teachers on how to answer the common misconception that evolution is inherently anti-religious or anti-Christian. Here is the section in its entirety:Misconception: Evolution and religion are incompatible.
Response: Religion and science (evolution) are very different things. In science (as in science class), only natural causes are used…