Evolution

Charles Darwin often gets lumped together with Karl Marx in an effort to ascribe the ills of the 20th century to Darwin's ideas about evolution. But science writer Matt Ridley explains why Darwin's ideas are closer to Adam Smith's than they are to Marx's. He argues that selection can account for the appearance of design not just in biology, but also in the economy and technology. And in fact, the idea of natural selection is an intellectual decendant of Adam Smith's invisible hand: Locke and Newton begat Hume and Voltaire who begat Hutcheson and Smith who begat Malthus and Ricardo who begat…

Nearly every summary of creationism and the law that I've read includes some sort of statement to the effect that 'the judicial decisions have left the door cracked slightly open for creation science.' Two generally excellent books on the subject illustrate this phenomenon. Edward Humes, in Monkey Girl writes about the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court decision striking down a Louisiana law requiring that "creation science" be taught. Humes quotes Scalia's rather juvenile dissent (the man couldn't help but drape his argument in insults for his colleagues), and writes: In other words,…

Edward Larson, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes trial (which I highly recommend), writes in Bookforum about the influence of racism on Darwin's thinking. Creationists argue (as most recently exemplified in Ben Stein's widely panned film Expelled) that "practically all the harmful practices and deadly philosophies that plague mankind have their roots and pseudo-rationale in evolutionism." To these people, in this year of big Darwin bicentennial celebrations,  "all the hoopla must seem like throwing a birthday party for Hitler." On the other hand, Most scientists…

Is a recent PNAS paper a knock against evolution? Does it support a "the concept of a preexistent design, with front-loaded genetic programs"? Nonsense. PZ explains why. Go read this if you're at all tempted to believe the intelligent design peanut gallery over at Uncommon Dissent. Remember, those guys do no science - they have no labs, they do no field work, they don't test any hypotheses. They just sit back and distort the latest findings published by real scientists.

Two years ago, I had t-shirts made up for my evolution course that depicted Darwin's notebook sketch of a simple tree diagram capped by the words "I think". In total, we generated about $500 for conservation charities, and the students got a pretty cool shirt (I still see them around campus fairly frequently). Had I been teaching the course this semester, I probably would have produced the t-shirts again. This is Darwin Year, after all. But I'm not, so I won't. Instead, I have teamed up with a good friend (and former fellow grad student) who is now a website designer and graphic artist to…

Katy Kao, assistant professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, and Stanford University colleague Gavin Sherlock say their new study of yeast cells has resulted in the most detailed picture of an organism's evolutionary process to date. Working with populations of yeast cells, which were color-coded by fluorescent markers,  they were able to evolve the cells while maintaining a visual analysis of the entire process.  What does that mean?   It means the evolutionary process is even more dynamic than initially thought, with multiple beneficial adaptations…

While the scientific community, and most of the intelligent world, has widely accepted that the theory of natural selection is underlying mechanism of organic evolution, until recently our studies of evolutionary processes have been confined to the examples from a small plant orbiting an insignificant star in a mid-sized galaxy. From this limited viewpoint we know that evolution is intimately connected with life... but as scientists, we would love to expand the reaches of our database. The study of synthetic biology was until recently a theoretical science. Engineers, biochemists, and…

A series of papers in the journal Zebrafish provides a comprehensive look at future directions of research on pigment biology, stating that model organisms such as zebrafish can advance the scientific understanding of the genetic basis of human skin color and race. Guest Editors Keith C. Cheng, MD, PhD, Department of Pathology, Penn State College of Medicine, and David M. Parichy, PhD, Department of Biology, University of Washington, have compiled a  collection of scientific papers and historical perspectives on the study of pigmentation in zebrafish, a vertebrate that shares genetic…

In 1943 the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger gave a series of lectures in Dublin that were later published in book form under the title What Is Life? Its success was considerable as it kick-started the new field of molecular biology, but Schrodinger deliberately avoided an investigation into a definition of life, believing that the time was not ripe. In more recent times, Fred Adams, Professor of Physics at Michigan University, in The Origins of Existence – How Life Emerged in the Universe, wrestled manfully with this question, but he eventually concluded that “Achieving a universal…

Can you tell why this passage comparing Darwin's finches and humans is wrong? Many paths lay open when the finches first arrived, and the smallest flights and trials of their descendants were rewarded. That is why they have traveled in more directions than any other creatures on the islands, that is why they have evolved farther and faster than any other creatures: because they got here early. Our own line is now radiating farther, faster, and in more directions than any other single species in the history of the planet - and for a similar reason. We are the first creatures to arrive in the…