evolution
grrlscientist | May 14, 2006This morning, I saw this letter on the NYTimes Letters the the Editor page;
To the Editor:
One has only to look at the acceptance of "intelligent design" by the president and high-ranking members of Congress to define a society that looks on evolution with open hostility or suspicion.
Creationists recognized years ago that very few students take college courses in biology, and most are exposed to a serious study of biology only in high school. Today most biology texts cover evolution, but in specific chapters that can be conveniently ignored by teachers under threat. Such books use several…
oracknows | May 13, 2006If you want to see how depressingly ignorant about science President Bush's new Press Secretary Tony Snow is, you need go no further than this rant at Bad Astronomy about Snow's assertions about evolution confidently made in obviously complete ignorance about science, what a theory is, what a hypothesis is, or what evolutionary theory actually says.
Depressing. The spokesperson for our President is clueless about science.
evolgen | May 11, 2006Bad Astronomy has a rant up on Tony Snow (the new White House Press Secretary) and his creationist tendencies. I won't linger on the political implications of having an anti-science advocates in our government, but one quote from Snow is so ridiculous it needs to be pointed out:
These little insights give us the basis for admitting both views into the educational system. Evolutionary theory, like ID, isn't verifiable or testable. It's pure hypothesis -- like ID -- although very popular in the scientific community. Its limits help illuminate the fact that hypotheses are only as durable as the…
loom | May 11, 2006Viruses have a special place at the Loom--they're ubiquitous and have some pretty profound influences on the evolution of their hosts (including us). But a French scientist named Patrick Forterre wants to take it up a notch. He's arguing that our very DNA is the creation of viruses some four billion years ago. It's a controversial idea, but one that other scientists are definitely taking seriously. I've got the full story is here in today's issue of Science, and here on my web site. For gorey details, see The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for a paper by Forterre that surveys…
pharyngula | May 11, 2006Crap. Coturnix tagged me with this beautiful bird meme, and I am the wrong person to ask. I don't get out much, preferring to sit in the lab or the library, so my favorite birds are all in pieces and dead. But OK, since he asked…
Bird digits
Bird teeth
Bird brains
Jurassic bird brains
Bird lungs
Oviraptor pelves (does that count?)
Cretaceous bird embryos
Four-winged birds
Waimanu
And Archaeopteryx, of course.
pharyngula | May 11, 2006
Lots of people have sent me links to this—thanks, all!—and it's the perfect thing to lift me out of the finals week blahs, and it's also just in time for Mother's Day on Sunday: The Devonian Blues.
Every single girl and every little boy
Was born from the clan of the wayward Dipnoi
Don't let the preacher man spoil all the fun
Took a lot more than 6 days to get the job done
Amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals and man
All belong to the fish tribe, doncha' understand?
Your momma was a lobefinned fish
My momma was a lobefinned fish
Sing along, everyone!
razib | May 9, 2006A new paper by Daniel Kruger posits a general framework for why women tend to live longer than males across cultures when environment is equalized (obviously there are cultures where strong sex bias in quality of life is more important than underlying genotypic variation). The idea is simple, it is a spin off of antagonistic pleiotropy where males tend to engage in risky behavior when young and so increase their mortality in the interests of increasing their potential reproductive value. Additionally, for a host of of genetic and physiological reasons we are also susceptible to many…
pharyngula | May 8, 2006
The Wnt genes produce signalling proteins that play important roles in early development, regulating cell proliferation, differentiation and migration. It's hugely important, used in everything from early axis specification in the embryo to fine-tuning axon pathfinding in the nervous system. The way they work is that the Wnt proteins are secreted by cells, and they then bind to receptors on other cells (one receptor is named Frizzled, and others are LRP-5 and 6), which then, by a chain of cytoplasmic signalling events, removes β-catenin from a degradation pathway and promotes its import into…
pharyngula | May 8, 2006
One of the hallmark characters of animals is the presence of a specific cluster of genes that are responsible for staking out the spatial domains of the body plan along the longitudinal axis. These are the Hox genes; they are recognizable by virtue of the presence of a 60 amino acid long DNA binding region called the homeodomain, by similarities in sequence, by their role as regulatory genes expressed early in development, by the restriction of their expression to bands of tissue, by their clustering in the genome to a single location, and by the remarkable collinearity of their organization…
loom | May 8, 2006For those interested in Tiktaalik, the marvelous new transitional fossil of a fish with limbs, check out this new essay from Neil Shubin, one of the fossil's discoverers.
pharyngula | May 8, 2006
There are quite a few genes that are known to be highly conserved in both sequence and function in animals. Among these are the various Hox genes, which are expressed in an ordered pattern along the length of the organism and which define positional information along the anterior-posterior axis; and another is decapentaplegic (dpp) which is one of several conserved genes that define the dorsal-ventral axis. Together, these sets of genes establish the front-back and top-bottom axes of the animal, which in turn establishes bilaterality—this specifically laid out three-dimensional organization…
pharyngula | May 8, 2006The Cambrian vendobiont S. psygmoglena, gen.sp.nov., composite photo of part and counterpart to show both upper and lower surfaces.
From the pre-Cambrian and early Cambrian, we have a collection of enigmatic fossils: the small shellies appear to be bits and pieces of partially shelled animals; there are trace fossils, the tracks of small, soft-bodied wormlike animals; and there are the very peculiar Edicaran vendobionts, which look like fronds and fans and pleated or quilted sheets. In the Cambrian, of course, we find somewhat more familiar creatures—sure, they're weird and different, but we…
evolgen | May 6, 2006Grrl Scientist got a complementary copy of the Daily Kos science e-book. She's got a review of it here. Does reality have a liberal bias? Anyway, she also got into a screening of Flock of Dodos. She doesn't have a review up, but she did post some comments here. Apparently Randy Olson is familiar with blogs about science (ie, Carl Zimmer's site), but he doesn't know about blogs written by scientists. If Olson does read ScienceBlogs, here's a message: have a screening in Pennsylvania.
grrlscientist | May 6, 2006
After waiting in line for an hour and a half while being entertained by a flock of three smallish people clad in overstuffed neon orange dodo costumes, I was "number seven" in the last group of ten people granted admission to Flock of Dodos. But my wait was worth it because I really enjoyed this film. Flock of Dodos was a low-key humorous film, not an attack film, a la Michael Moore, and I think it made its points very well.
The filmmaker, Randy Olson, was key to the film's success because he has a way of quickly gaining people's trust, which made for good interviews. His mother, Muffy…
evolgen | May 4, 2006Via EurekAlert comes this news release on research into error checking during DNA polymerization. I'm not judging the science; I'm judging the reporting, which includes the following statement:
Everyone knows mutations - genetic mistakes in DNA, the material of heredity - are bad: The more mutations in the cell's DNA, the higher the risk of cancer developing.
In case the syntax in the title is unfamiliar to you, lemme spell it out for you: MUTATIONS ARE NOT NECESSARILY BAD. Sure, genetic mutations are responsible for diseases such as cancers, but they are also the raw material upon with all…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2006
Do you remember the film that I linked a long time ago, A Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus? I am pleased to see that this film, by producer and former biologist, Randy Olson, is receiving quite a bit of media attention after its recent debut in the Tribeca Film Festival here in NYC.
This film takes a humorous look at so-called "intelligent design," a school of thought that claims many of the seemingly miraculous and complex elements of nature must be the work of an intelligent designer (er, God).
Consistent with the card-playing theme of the film, Olson says that…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2006Some of you, dear readers, have probably wondered where I have been hiding these past few days. Well, besides being busy with teaching a conservation genetics course, I was also, unexpectedly, reading another book so I could publish the review here as soon as possible. Last Monday, Darksyde, co-author of Daily Kos, asked if I wished to take a quick look at their new electronic book ("ebook"), Kosmos: You are Here by Steven Darksyde and Mark Sumner (DevilsTower) (2006), whose sales will support the annual Kos convention. Being the audacious book whore that I am, combined with having never read…
evolgen | May 3, 2006When the earth shook and the San Francisco Bay Area trembled, a statue fell off the Zoology building at Stanford. That statue was of the paleontologist Louis Agassiz. Agassiz, a contemporary of Charles Darwin and staunch critic of his theory of evolution, got his due. Kevin calls it irony; I say it's symbolic of the end of the anti-evolution movement. Everything since then has been dedicated towards resurrecting ghosts. The picture is below the fold.
evolgen | May 3, 2006The Journal of Clinical Investigation has published an open access article calling all scientists to step up and defend science in American schools. The article focuses mostly on combating the anti-evolution movement, but the themes can be extended to all of science. Apparently the last time the JCI published an article dealing with intelligent design they received quite a few letters asking why a legitimate scientific publication should deal with pseudoscience. This time, the publishers included a pre-emptive statement justifying their actions.
If you care about the state of science…
loom | May 3, 2006X-Men may be closer than you think | CNET News.com
I suspect all science writers have had the unhappy experience sooner or later of busting their butts to translate tough science into clear writing, only to have a headline writer top it off with a load of nonsense.
For more on the unhappy collision between Darwin and X-men see Chris Mooney here.
(Fraternal hat tip)