Field of Science

The evolving carnival

The CoE blogger thinks Carnival of Evolution is evolving. Doofus! There's no population, no real inheritance, and not even a genetic code to be transmitted. All it amounts to then is akin to memes, and they really don't evolve the same as genes. I like the stats, though:
Figure 1: Number of posts included in CoE by month from its conception in August 2008 through May 2012. Not all months are included, because not all past editions are accessible. Numbers are approximate (counted one time by one person).

Notice that very consistent increase in body size of CoE over through time. A one-tailed t-test with unequal variance on the first half of editions vs. the second half gives p= 4.7072e-5, which is highly significant. That is, the average change in size from the first half (18.81) to the second (33.95) is not due to random fluctuations in number of posts included in the editions. CoE is definitely evolving. Creationists, go redacted!

There are still a few days left to submit to the next edition, which will be hosted on Pharyngula (clue: get linked to and get 29,000 in a day).

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