News

Newsweek here.

Also: Rick Mcginnis reviews the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times (Landmark Report Jul 09, 2011), recounting,

Subtitled “A Year Inside The New York Times,” Andrew Rossi’s film begins at the paper’s printing plant, the camera following huge rolls of newsprint on their way to becoming the next morning’s edition of the Times. This is the physical incarnation of institutions like the New York Times, with their insistence on remaining once daily, pulp-and-ink, top heavy, capital intensive operations in a digital age without deadlines or time zones, where a billion-dollar enterprise with lovely new offices in midtown Manhattan can be scooped by a blog published from a laptop in a coffee shop.

Like here, for example. And countless other places.  Read More ›

Here: This work is difficult and time consuming, but the question at its core—the genetic origin of new and complex traits—is probably still one of the most pertinent and fundamental unanswered questions in evolution today. At stake is the possibility of testing whether novel complex traits arise from a gradual building of novel developmental networks, gene by gene, or whether pre-existent modules of interacting genes are recruited together to play novel roles in novel parts of the organism. – Monteiro A, Podlaha O (2009) Wings, Horns, and Butterfly Eyespots: How Do Complex Traits Evolve? PLoS Biol 7(2): e1000037. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000037 February 24, 2009 But surely the answer c has come in by now, right? Alternatively: Those guys must be creationists if Read More ›

They didn’t make it into the film. Caroline Crocker, author of Free to Think and currently executive director of AITSE (dedicated to rescuing science from the mudslide of “science”), reflected in her book on discovering that she was not alone, that the Expelled were quite numerous:

There is companionship in troubles, and the more public my case became the mor others experiencing the same type of persecution contacted me and shared their own stories. Over 800 intellectually honest colleagues admit to seeing flaws in the theory of evolution and as a result many have suffered attacks on their careers and reputations. I was told of Nancy Bryson, a chemistry professor at Mississippi State University, who nearly lost her job for teaching the evidence for and against neo-Darwinian evolution to honors students, despite the fact that universities are supposed to be places for open inquiry and academic freedom. The university decided against demoting her only after her story was made public. In comparison, the case of the immunologist who lost his job after 30 years of stellar research has not been made public, simply because he still hopes to secure another position.  Read More ›

I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith (pp. 158-164), and my thinking on the subject has not changed. The “war on drugs” has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. Read More ›

If “them” are the new atheists, here’s the kind of thing you’d get in response: Read More ›

From “Environs Prompt Advantageous Gene Mutations as Plants Grow; Changes Passed to Progeny” (ScienceDaily, July 5, 2011) we learn:

If a person were to climb a towering redwood and take a sample from the top and a sample from the bottom of the tree, a comparison would show that the two DNA samples are different.Christopher A. Cullis, chair of biology at Case Western Reserve University, explains that this is the basis of his controversial research findings. Read More ›

In a popular lecture delivered in Vienna I 1900, the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the fathers of statistical mechanics and the kinetic theory of gases, declared that the nineteenth century would be remembered as the Century of Darwin, then stated: In my view all salvation for philosophy may be expected to come from Darwin’s theory. … What then will be the position of the so-called laws of thought in logic? Well, in the light of Darwin’s theory they will be nothing else but inherited habits of thought. … One can call these laws of thought a priori because through many thousands of years of our species’ experience they have become innate to the individual, but it seems to be Read More ›

At Eurekalert ( 7-Jul-2011), we learn:

Jewel beetles, obtained from local people, turn out to be 4 species unknown to science

A team of researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences discovered four new species of jewel beetles (Buprestidae) from South-eastern Asia. This family of beetles is named for their particularly beautiful body and fascinating, shiny colours.

“All new species belong to the genus Philanthaxia. Before the publication of this study, 61 species had been known from this genus. Currently, it comprises of 65 species, with a primarily Southeast-Asian distribution, except for two species extending to the Australasian region”, said Oto Nakládal, a co-author of the study.

Beetles do speciate very readily. From famous mid-twentieth century Darwinist J.B.S. Haldane:

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order. That kind of thing is characteristic of nature.

So maybe not such a surprise. On the other hand,
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Now that News of the World has been shuttered in a scandal, what would we do without New Scientist for our  dose? In “Are wide-faced men rascals?” (07 July 2011), Andy Coghlan manages a straight face, reporting, Can it be true that men with extra-wide faces are more likely to be liars and cheats? That’s what a study published this week claims, but some researchers specialising in the evolution of trustworthiness have questioned the results.The study’s authors claim to have shown that men are most likely to cheat and lie if they have wider faces as measured by the facial width-to-height ratio, or WHR. Sceptics argue that the evidence supporting such a huge claim is weak, especially given that the Read More ›

In Origination of organismal form: beyond the gene in developmental and evolutionary biology (MIT Press, 2003), we learn about the first Altenberg meeting  (1999) of biologists who doubt Darwin. The locally famous one, that Suzan Mazur covered, came later. Read More ›

Claire Berlinski comments at Ricochet: “Seriously, if you could have seen how everyone scrambled to get out of the camera when I said we just want to talk about the interesting things we were talking about yesterday. And people are afraid. It would be the end of their careers.” Caption quote: “People who want to explore these ideas are as afraid of reprisal as anyone I’ve ever met in Turkey. (Excessively so, I’d say: It’s not as if anyone is going to lock them up. But obviously, something is keeping them from speaking freely. And that cannot be good for any of us.) ” The fact that the “land of the free” is governed by an unrepresentative elite is incisively Read More ›

“We call these events [mutations] accidental; we say they are random occurrences. And since they constitute the only possible source of modification in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structures, it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. Read More ›

In “The Role of Creation in Science: The Real Story, a Breath of Fresh Air” (Evolution News & Views, July 2, 2011), science historian Michael Flannery remarks on Jonathan Bartlett’s “The Doctrine of Creation and the Making of Modern Biology,”

In a recent article at the Classical Conversations web site, Jonathan Bartlett authored an interesting commentary on creation as a concept for and catalyst to scientific inquiry and advance with “The Doctrine of Creation and the Making of Modern Biology.” Given the persistent claim by so-called “defenders” of quality science education such as Eugenie Scott, Paul Hanle, and others that only natural processes functioning via unbroken natural laws in nonpurposeful ways counts as science and that anything else is a “science stopper,” everyone–especially those least likely to do so–would do well to take page from Bartlett’s page of history. Read More ›

In “Climate of Fear: Big Science, Big Government” (Forbes, July 8, 2011), Patrick Michaels, lobbyist for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, admits, In his 1961 Farewell Address, Dwight Eisenhower famously predicted the rise of a “military-industrial complex,” in which he said, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”. He then went on to speculate as to what Vannevar Bush had wrought.Few remember the next paragraphs, in which he said that at universities, because of the enormous cost of scientific research, “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” and that “we must also be alert” to the “danger that public policy itself could become the captive of a scientific-technological Read More ›

Here. Epistasis between Beneficial Mutations and the Phenotype-to-Fitness Map for a ssDNA VirusDarin R. Rokyta1*, Paul Joyce2, S. Brian Caudle1, Craig Miller3, Craig J. Beisel2, Holly A. Wichman3 Epistatic interactions between genes and individual mutations are major determinants of the evolutionary properties of genetic systems and have therefore been well documented, but few quantitative data exist on epistatic interactions between beneficial mutations, presumably because such mutations are so much rarer than deleterious ones . We explored epistasis for beneficial mutations by constructing genotypes with pairs of mutations that had been previously identified as beneficial to the ssDNA bacteriophage ID11 and by measuring the effects of these mutations alone and in combination. We constructed 18 of the 36 possible double mutants Read More ›