An evolutionary biologist and geneticist at the University of California, Irvine, he speaks often at universities, in churches, for social groups and elsewhere, usually in defense of the theory of evolution and against the arguments of creationism and its ideological cousin, intelligent design.Usually he preaches to the converted. But not always. …
Read the rest at: Roving Defender of Evolution …
The Florida House yesterday voted to require teachers to criticize evolution when teaching the subject in Florida public schools. The house version of the bill will now, most likely, travel back to the Senate (where a similar bill, was recently passed). Governor Charlie Crist is not talking about whether or not he will sign the bill.
“What this bill does is tell the teacher, go ahead and teach the theory of evolution and make sure your students have a complete view of that theory and they know that it is only a theory, it is not gospel law,” said Rep. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla. “There’s no proof that any species has transitioned from one thing to another.”
You can read about it here, and add your comments to the news web site.
Food webs — the network of trophic (eating) interaction among the many species sharing a habitat or biome — is a much studied aspect of ecology. Food web and other similar phenomena such as dispersal syndromes are epiphenomena of evolution, resulting from the negotiation of competitive and cooperative interactions among many individuals. Indeed, the food web is the gross-level movement of energy within the ebb and flow of entropy and life-based energy capture. This flow of energy is fundamental to all life systems.
The delicacy or vulnerability of a particular habitat … the potential susceptibility or resistance to perturbation … may depend on the details of this network of interactions. If everything ultimately depends on a basal food type that goes extinct, for example, there could be big trouble.So, just as understanding any aspect of life requires that we examine historically ancient, no longer extant systems, we need to understand ancient food webs. But, a valid study of food webs requires a certain level of detail that is often absent from the data available for ancient systems.Moments ago, a study of Cambrian food webs came out in PLoS Biology. Continue reading Cambrian Food Webs
Darwin did a LOT of stuff. It is amazing how often one can trace some basic bit of modern scientific knowledge to an observation or experiment Darwin while travelling on the Beagle, later on in his bathtub, or in his back yard. The NYT has a nice piece on one example of this. Continue reading Darwin’s Flower Experiments
Some of my colleagues are downplaying the recent paper in science showing a: that mastodons are elephants and b: that birds and dinosaurs … in particular Tyrannosaurus rex and turkeys … are related. (See here and here, for instance)Yes, it is true that these phylogenetic findings are wholly uninteresting, being exactly what we expected. But that is WHY these particular phylogenies were carried out.You see, the research is being done with organic material that is very very old, and is amazingly, remarkably, unexpectedly and astoundingly preserved. The point of using this material to test a phylogeny that we already know is actually to test the material … the organic stuff in the ‘fossils’ … to see if it is for real.And yes, indeed, it is. Bits of rotted flesh from a mastodon and an old dinosaur exist. Ick.Here are the ancient elephant and the dinosaur resting comfortably on their phylogenetic laurels: Continue reading Ancient Soft Parts: Dinosaur and Elephant Tales
“Teaching Creationism in Schools,” the second in a series of videos produced by NCSE, debuted at expelledexposed.com on April 23, 2008. The brief video presents three incidents in which NCSE helped concerned citizens to resist assaults on the integrity of evolution education. In the video, NCSE’s Eugenie C. Scott explains: “If we’re going to have good science education, now and in the future, we have to support people like Erec [Hillis], people like the citizens of Dover, and people like the citizens in Kansas, and we have to put out those brushfires. And NCSE is going to be there until the last fire is out.”
Good question … what IS in the air?The simple answer is that the air … the Earth’s atmosphere … is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there’s dirt. I want to talk a little about the oxygen, one of the other gases (carbon dioxide to be exact), the water vapor, and the dirt. Continue reading What’s in the air?
Darrow was born this day in 1857. He was a lawyer and a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
We know him as the defender of John Scopes in the Monkey Trial of 1925. Darrow and Scopes lost that trial, which was the first of many court cases regarding the teaching of creationism vs. evolution in public schools. Virtually all of the subsequent cases were victories for the evolutionists. Indeed, the Monkey Trial was a victory for evolutionists as well, because it is widely recognized that although the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff, Darrow’s arguments were so powerful that the nation was left feeling that he had won the argument. Continue reading Happy Birthday Clarence Darrow
A huge archive of Darwin’s unpublished material has been put on line this week at The Complete Works of Charles Darwin. Many of his notebooks were already on line, but much of that was previously published (so the notes that were on line were actually published. The newly netted material has no previously been available to anyone who did not go to the original archives.This is the raw stuff, scans of the actual papers.
The main link to access this material is HERE. This is the same site that I have used in my earlier posts on Darwin’s writings.
The following video is on the NCSE Expelled Exposed web site, but that site is getting so much use it is broken! So enjoy the video while we wait for ExpelledExposed to come back up…Expelled exposed is here.
That elephants have an aquatic ancestry has been suspected for some time now. Moreover, the idea of elephant aquatic origins and elephant origins in general is part of a growing realization that many of the world’s aquatic mammals originated in a couple of regions of Africa that were for a very long time enormous inland seas (but that is another story I won’t cover here).
The earlier evidence came from observation of the ontogeny of the kidneys in elephants, during which the kidneys take on the characteristics that are found in aquatic mammals generally. That research was published in 1999, and is summarized here: Continue reading Elephants Were Aquatic
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr….
Welcome to the Lucky 13th Edition of The Boneyard … the Web Carnival about Bones and Stuff.
“The Boneyard is a blog carnival covering all things paleo, from dinosaurs to pollen to hominids and everywhere in between. It’s held every two weeks (the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month), traveling around to a different blog for each installment, connecting some of the best blogging on ancient life.”
The previous edition of The Boneyard is here, at Dragon’s Tales. The next edition of The Boneyard will be Here at Archaeozoology. If you would like to submit an entry to the next edition, you may do so here. As always, thanks to Brian for originating and managing this carnival.
A very important and truly wonderful paper in Nature described a tour-de-force analysis of the Mammalian Evolutionary Record, and draws the following two important conclusions:
The ape human split is a bit of a moving target. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were geneticists who placed it at very recent (close to 4 million years ago) and palaeoanthropologists, using fossils, who placed it at much earlier. During the 1980s, the ape-human split moved back in time because of the importance of sivapithecus, then later in time when Sivapithecus slipped and fell out of the hominid/hominin (human ancestor) family tree. Meanwhile the geneticists were moving towards a more and more recent split. At one point not too long ago, all the evidence converged with the split being around five million years ago. The fossils and the genes agreed, and there were rumors (but nothing published) saying that palaeoanthropologists working in Ethiopia were prepared (soon) to announce that one of the fossils dating to this time had “less then fully developed” bipedalism.But science marches on, and the kinds of questions we are asking of the human fossil record are more detailed than the fossil record usually gives up in a mere few decades of research. So new finds came along and everything changed again. Now, there is a new paper by Richmond and Jungers suggesting that one of the earliest hominid, Orrorin tugenensis, was just as bipedal as any australopith, yet is much farther back in time than, and in many ways, different from our genus (Homo). Continue reading Early, somewhat controversial hominid walked like an Australopith