Later artificial life researchers created programs to take advantage of the growing power of computers to model evolution in simple, abstract universes. Tierra, in particular, first developed by the ecologist Thomas Ray in the early 1990s, drew a great deal of attention. The program, which ran on more than 100 workstations, demonstrated the mutation of digital forms and elementary aspects of evolution. More recently, Spore, from Will Wright, popularized many of the aspects of artificial life in a game that is now widely available on desktop computers, videogame consoles and even iPhones.Tierra and its successors are computer programs in which digital organisms really do evolve. Spore, on the other hand, is nothing like it. Rather, it's a lot like creationism.
This lionfish invasion is an ecological distaster. We need a plan of action to manage this invasive species, a plan which will stop the spread of these quick-breeding sea-vermin and help protect the native populations from the advancing threat.That's right. All you need to do is request them at restaurants and your local supermarket, and you can help save the environment. And they taste great, too.
We need to eat them.
Carnival of Evolution is only three days away, and it's going to be HUGE. I know none of you can wait, and that you all have a hard time going about your daily lives with so much great evolution stuff just around the corner, so here's a trailer with some highlights from the 16th edition of Carnival of Evolution:Chimps are very promiscuous, humans somewhat less so, while gorillas would argue that the selfish gene theory also needs expanding. Do the animals know that we have evolved a light coloured fur coat in a relatively short geological period of time? A small brain can result from pleiotropy, the phenomenon of a single gene having multiple and seemingly unconnected phenotypic mice. Dembski grades his students on how well they troll, and was wrong about the utility of the surprising connection between mite behavior and God existence. Chimps and humans continued to interbreed long after they split in evolutionary time, so humans therefore did not evolve from a knuckle walking ancestor.Carnival of Evolution 16 - coming to a blog near you on October 1st ! ! !
I do have a complaint, however. The book preaches to the converted. Its polemical tone can become wearying and may produce the unintended effect of nudging undecided readers in the wrong direction. Poorly disguising his contempt, Prothero's rhetoric is sometimes over the top, as when he refers to "hard working, dedicated, self-sacrificing biologists who spend years enduring harsh conditions in the field" in contrast to "creationists who sit in their comfortable homes and write drivel" (p 113). Please! The facts of paleontology stand on their own. They do not need to be undermined by rhetorical shenanigans.Dodson seems to favor writing that strokes the creationists and/or the fence-sitters by the hair. I agree that Prothero's rhetoric is at times over the top, but the whole situation, the level of discourse between scientists and creationists, is already over the top. I personally find it relieving to hear Prothero vent his frustration, but I guess that's because I share it. I am part of the choir, I suppose you could say. However, I don't think there's much chance that Prothero's polemic tone is going to nudge anyone in the wrong direction (i.e. towards creationism), because the book - being detailed and technical and spanning almost 400 pages - is highly unlikely to be read by anyone who isn't extremely interested in (and on the side of) science in the first place. [Update: Turns out I am wrong about that - see Don's comment below.]
It wasn't enough to save the dinosaurs, though. The findings suggest there was no global inferno, but instead a blanket of debris that cast a dim pall over the planet.
Unable to access sunlight, plants that were critical sources of food quickly died. Even areas like western Europe, where the effects were less severe, the famine lasted long enough to wipe the big animals out.
And being through with creationism, I very nearly became through with Christianity. I was on the very verge of becoming an atheist. During that time, I re-read a book I had reviewed prior to its publication. It was Alan Hayward's Creation/Evolution. Even though I had reviewed it 1984 prior to its publication in 1985, I hadn't been ready for the views he expressed. He presented a wonderful Days of Proclamation view which pulled me back from the edge of atheism. Although I believe Alan applied it to the earth in an unworkable fashion, his view had the power to unite the data with the Scripture, if it was applied differently. That is what I have done with my views. Without that I would now be an atheist. There is much in Alan's book I agree with and much I disagree with but his book was very important in keeping me in the faith. While his book may not have changed the debate totally yet, it did change my life. [Emphasis added.]Hilarious. Sad.
"Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen."These are the words of Ray Kurzweil, whom the Telegraph calls a scientist. I wouldn't go that far.
"Nanotechnology will extend our mental capacities to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes.Look, I also believe that nanotechnology will result in many interesting and beneficial additions to our lives (if society doesn't crash sooner), but these things are a tad foolish. Okay, so if he turns out to be right in 25 years, then I'll have to say that I wasn't the big visionary. The unfairness is that he just has to see one of his far-fetched predictions come true, and he will be named a living oracle (presuming he is still alive at 86, of course, but then I know that Kurzeil is 100% certain of that).
Claim: [Joseph] Mercola says “Injecting organisms into your body to provoke immunity is contrary to nature.”Generally, whether our actions are contrary to nature or not is insufficient argument to determine whether we should carry them out or not. Death from disease is natural, yet we try to prevent it. The use of DDT in agriculture is unnatural, and we try to prevent it (c.f. Stockholm Convention).
Fact: Nature kills people. Doing something contrary to nature is what medicine is all about. It’s a good thing.
[One] person pointed out that shots hurt and that alone should tell you something. “Yet you are willing to trust these people with your lives to make a vaccine that the Creator never intended the human body should need, and let them inject it into your body? You people are scary or insane!”Shots hurt, and that should tell me... what? Love hurts. Diarrhea hurts. Physical therapy hurts. As for the “Creator" who created Loa loa, I really don't see how anything he supposedly did* could have any bearing on what we should do.
In June 2009, the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) formally ratified a proposal by the International Commission on Stratigraphy to lower the base of the Quaternary System/Period to the Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) of the Gelasian Stage/Age at Monte San Nicola, Sicily, Italy. The Gelasian until then had been the uppermost stage of the Pliocene Series/Epoch. The base of the Gelasian corresponds to Marine Isotope Stage 103, and has an astronomically tuned age of 2.58 Ma.
← The quaternary period formerly started at 1.8 million years ago, but it has now been extended to include the Gelasian stage going back to 2.58 mya. The results of the voting were overwhelmingly in favour of the SQS recommendations. In the final ballot, 89% of the ICS voting membership supported the Quaternary case. In May 2009, the ICS forwarded the results to the IUGS Executive Committee, and on 29 June 2009 that body formally ratified the SQS proposal. This brings closure to a debate that has run for more than six decades and, from a Quaternary perspective at least, the outcome is entirely satisfactory. In addition, with the imposition of the 10-year moratorium, this matter cannot be revisited until 2019 at the earliest.The begging question is, of course, does it matter? Will this change anything we know? I'm fairly certain it won't, but that it's all just about agreeing on what to call what - even though this of course has to reflect what we know.
That post let me to another on the same subject, The Reproductive Advantages of Religiosity, where I posted this comment:And modern people have retained a capacity for atheism, which suggests some competing reproductive benefit.I would be very skeptical of the idea that a 'capacity for atheism' must have a reproductive benefit. You basically saying that just because there are atheists around, this capacity must be selected for. That does not need to be so. Besides, if the numbers are really true, and assuming religious belief is heritable, then it is hard to argue that a capacity for atheism increases fitness.
However, I would also doubt that religiosity is heritable enough that it can overcome 'cultural evolution,' meaning that even though religious people have more children, atheism might still grow when the children are influenced by factors that cause them to lose their faith (education, in the broadest sense).
For religiosity to be adaptive, it is not enough to show that religious people have more children. Rates at which people change their religiosity must be incorporated. Do you have these data?Basically, I think people are over-eager and extrapolate wildly from the data they have, which is not enough to draw the conclusions that they would like to make. Crucially, religiosity is a meme, not a gene. How many children you have might be influenced by how often you go to church/mosque/temple/shrine, but as any Christian missionary knows very well, conversion* happens on a daily basis, and so the heritability of religiosity is not perfect (H2<1).
For example, assuming that all children born of religious parents become religious themselves, it is very hard to explain that there are any atheists around at all.But from an evolutionary as well as philosophic perspective, it may seem rather odd to try to defeat nature with naturalistic arguments."Why? Nature can inform us, but that does not mean we should bow to it. This is the same thing with many other aspects of human life. It is "natural" to get diseases and die before the age of thirty, and yet we fight it.
Lastly, I gather that when you say that there is no consensus on the meaning of the biological terms you mention (adaptation, etc.) that you mean among social scientists like yourself? Evolutionary biologists have strict definitions of the terms, of course.
"Odin, a white Bengal tiger, swims with his eyes wide open as he dives under water for a piece of meat at Odin's Temple of the Tiger exhibit at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, Vallejo, California, on July 23, 2009. In the wild, all of the big cat species will will dive under water to get its prey or just cool off."
The audio was recorded just before Obama went on camera to do an interview with CNBC. Before the interview began, Obama -- referring to Kanye's antics on stage -- said "I thought that was really inappropriate," then adding, "He's a jackass."Obama on Kanye...
The peculiar demands of our granting system have favoured an upper class of skilled scientists who know how to raise money for a big group [3]. They have mastered a glass bead game that rewards not only quality and honesty, but also salesmanship and networking. A large group is the secret because applications are currently judged in a way that makes it almost immaterial how many of that group fail, so long as two or three do well. Data from these successful underlings can be cleverly packaged to produce a flow of papers—essential to generate an overlapping portfolio of grants to avoid gaps in funding.And here's the consequence (better grant-writers, less innovative research):
Thus, large groups can appear effective even when they are neither efficient nor innovative. Also, large groups breed a surplus of PhD students and postdocs that flood the market; many boost the careers of their supervisors while their own plans to continue in research are doomed from the outset. The system also helps larger groups outcompete smaller groups, like those headed by younger scientists such as K. It is no wonder that the average age of grant recipients continues to rise [4]. Even worse, sustained success is most likely when risky and original topics are avoided and projects tailored to fit prevailing fashions—a fact that sticks a knife into the back of true research [5]. As Sydney Brenner has said, “Innovation comes only from an assault on the unknown” [6].And, finally, the solution:
Drastic simplification of this grant-writing process would help scientists return to the business of doing science. Grant applications should be much shorter, and if so, scientists would spend less time writing them and less time reviewing other applications.Asses grant applications on previous work, rather than future work. Previous work documents that the P.I. can get research done, and what the quality of that research is. This would also, crucially, free up time for researchers to do research, rather than writing grant applications.
(...)
The solution is to allow, say, only three to five of the best papers of the group from over the previous five years to be offered for assessment (as Howard Hughes Medical Institute already do in the US). The evaluation of these papers should be corrected for the size of the group, i.e., productivity would be rated per person, not per group. If these reforms were enacted, the pressure to rush out many papers would be replaced by pressure to complete projects that report stories of value and present them well.
Watson believes that scientists ought to push themselves to be stars, making at least one great achievement, going for the gold.Ha! Not bad for the old guy (which in no way means I concur with any of his views about intelligence...).
"Why should scientists be stars?" Krulwich prods.
Watson answers without missing a beat. "It's better to be bright than dim."
Did it occur to Darwin or his wife that nothing in his ideas precluded the existence of God? Today, no major religion finds conflict between God and the theory of evolution. The majority of Christians can live with both ideas; religious opposition to Darwin is limited primarily to a fundamentalist minority of American Christians.Beg your pardon?
Meanwhile, have you wondered why, if the Mayans were able to pinpoint the end of time in 2012, they were unable to see that their own civilization would collapse in the ninth century?Indeed.
“He is a reverend,” Garcia Luna said. “He said it was a divine revelation that drove him to this action.”What a lunatic! Praise the Lord that this is the only case ever where divine revelation has driven anyone to commit dangerous acts like this one.
The hijacker was wearing jeans and a white shirt when he was paraded in front of reporters after his arrest and appeared to be smiling and chewing gum. He took action because yesterday’s date, Sept. 9, 2009, represented an upside-down 666.I guess that's why nothing like this happened on June 6th, 2006, because that's 999 upside-down, and that doesn't mean anything.
Flores is a born-again Christian who had been on the verge of suicide. He spent time in jail in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for armed robbery, Garcia Luna said.Three cans of hommus. As the saying goes, you can't make this stuff up. Soon they'll ban food on planes altogether.
Flores threatened the crew from Aeromexico flight 576 with a fake bomb made from a red light affixed to three cans of hummus about an hour after takeoff from Cancun, Garcia Luna said. The pilot told the authorities and later acted as interlocutor between Flores and officials once the plane landed in Mexico City at about 1:40 p.m. local time.
Nature 461, 167 (10 September 2009) | doi:10.1038/461167b; Published online 9 September 2009(Emphasis added.)
Evolution pioneers: celebrating Lamarck at 200, Darwin 215
William E. Friedman1
1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
Email: ned@colorado.edu
Sir
I take issue with the contention that Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, tackled evolution only in poetic terms, as implied by Dan Graur and colleagues in their insightful Book Review ('In retrospect: Lamarck's treatise at 200' Nature 460, 688–689; 2009).
Erasmus Darwin's most important contributions to evolutionary thought will be found in the very unpoetic prose of the first volume of his major medical and zoological treatise, Zoonomia, published in 1794.
Here, notably in Section 39, are discussions of deep time and the descent of all life from a single ancestor, bauplan homology among vertebrates, the analogy of artificial selection as a means of understanding descent with modification, and a brief but clear enunciation of the process of sexual selection.
One need only to look at the backlash against Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary ideas, in the savage political cartoons of James Gillray in 1798 and of others, to understand that — years before Lamarck made his contributions to evolutionary thought — Erasmus Darwin was triggering strong reactions for promoting a transformist view of biodiversity.
This year is justly celebrating the history-altering contributions of Charles Darwin. But it is equally important to take stock of the critical intellectual steps before 1859 that made scientific and social acceptance of evolution possible.
Besides Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, a host of other influential evolutionists, including Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Robert Chambers, Baden Powell, Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace, deserve to be recognized (as well as read) for having laid a path to a modern view of descent with modification.
ERRATA.I have noticed before that old s's looks like f's, but in this case there are also properly looking s's, such as in 'prefs.'
THE reader will pleafe to excufe en error of the corrector of the prefs - the paging from 154 - 171 is omitted, although the fubftance and fubject of the work is correctly continued - and he will pleafe to alter one figure with his pen that follows 235, by making it 236, &c. to page 250.
The Bookbinder will pleafe to obferve, that there is no fignature M, and that the book is perfect wanting it.
But I'm not holding my breath, and I'd advise you against it as well.
Next month, on the first of October, I will be hosting Carnival of Evolution here on Pleiotropy, and I predict a number of great posts about evolution will be submitted. However, I don't expect especially many to be submitted, and I would like to change that.Both sides of the evolution/intelligent design controversy should have the opportunity to present their scientific arguments to students. No one is being forced to believe in God, so there is no real violation of separation of church and state.No one is being forced to believe in God... so we can say anything we want to anyone anywhere? Tell elementary school students that evolution is wrong and creationism is right, and that if they don't believe that, they will end up in Hell. As long as you don't force them to believe it, this is not separation of church and state? Then what does this word 'force' really mean? That you enter their brains and force the neurons to fire in a manner that makes the brain believe in creationism?
because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.Willingham couldn't afford a lawyer, so he had one assigned. I often wonder if those lawyers that are assigned are the bottom-of-the-class kind of lawyers, of what the deal are with those.
Willingham’s refusal to accept the deal confirmed the view of the prosecution, and even that of his defense lawyers, that he was an unrepentant killer.Then, either way the prosecutor and the defense lawyers would conclude that he was a killer. I'm not saying Willingham was innocent, but this is like throwing a woman into the river and saying she' a witch if she floats. Apparently no one could understand why he would not plead guilty, but I think I can. Perhaps he'd rather die than serving a life sentence and admitting something he did not do. And, if he did do it, perhaps he didn't really want to live any longer.
An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”Interesting facts, those.
Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”
When Stacy [Willingham's wife and mother of the three children] was on the stand, Jackson [the prosecutor] grilled her about the “significance” of Willingham’s “very large tattoo of a skull, encircled by some kind of a serpent.”Think about that before you get your first tattoo. And don't listen to heavy metal:
“It’s just a tattoo,” Stacy responded.
“He just likes skulls and snakes. Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. He just had—he got a tattoo on him.”
The prosecution cited such evidence in asserting that Willingham fit the profile of a sociopath
At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.”Gilbert finds that more evidence is bogus, particularly the testimony by the fellow inmate, who looks like he lied about that whole confession-in-prison thing.
During America’s Colonial period, dozens of crimes were punishable by death, including horse thievery, blasphemy, “man-stealing,” and highway robbery.Even blasphemy? One more of those:
In 1868, John Stuart Mill made one of the most eloquent defenses of capital punishment, arguing that executing a murderer did not display a wanton disregard for life but, rather, proof of its value. “We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself,” he said. For Mill, there was one counterargument that carried weight—“that if by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected.”But it happens:
In 1993, Ruben Cantu was executed in Texas for fatally shooting a man during a robbery. Years later, a second victim, who survived the shooting, told the Houston Chronicle that he had been pressured by police to identify Cantu as the gunman, even though he believed Cantu to be innocent. Sam Millsap, the district attorney in the case, who had once supported capital punishment (“I’m no wild-eyed, pointy-headed liberal”), said that he was disturbed by the thought that he had made a mistake.Liberals are pointy-headed? What does that mean? But true, I have read elsewhere that one of the traits of conservatives is that they don't have a huge problem with some innocent people suffering when it's for the sake of the whole community; they can live fine with social injustice. Liberals not so much. Me, not a chance. Scalia just denies that it has ever happened:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”
The warden told Willingham that it was time. Willingham, refusing to assist the process, lay down; he was carried into a chamber eight feet wide and ten feet long. The walls were painted green, and in the center of the room, where an electric chair used to be, was a sheeted gurney. Several guards strapped Willingham down with leather belts, snapping buckles across his arms and legs and chest. A medical team then inserted intravenous tubes into his arms. Each official had a separate role in the process, so that no one person felt responsible for taking a life.(Emphasis added.)
After his death, his parents were allowed to touch his face for the first time in more than a decade. Later, at Willingham’s request, they cremated his body and secretly spread some of his ashes over his children’s graves. He had told his parents, “Please don’t ever stop fighting to vindicate me.”Remember Scalia's claim?
There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”Suck on that, Scalia!
Carnival of Evolution 15 just went up at Southern Fried Science, from where I'll highlight this post by Satya where she asks this question:The Rexes and Spots of the world have been man’s best friend for 15,000 years. But when and where did humans begin domesticating these furry companions?I'd like to argue, though, that perhaps it wasn't really humans that domesticated dogs, but rather the other way around. Seriously.
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.I hasten to say that while I agree with Dawkins that the theory of evolution is such a well tested model of what happens to living things on Earth, I'll say that doubt is to be cherished. It is with doubt in hand that any theory is understood, always being questioned at every turn along the way. As a researcher, there is no reasonable doubt left that evolution has, is, and will continue to occur, but both the fine and the coarse details are still diligently worked on, and doubt is a prerequisite of skepticism, and skepticism is the sine qua non of any scientist.
