Paul Nelson

Thought I’d whack the hornets’ nest with that deliberately provocative title.

But Dawkins isn’t the only person who can pack a lecture hall to capacity these days. Last Friday evening (1/22), molecular biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago spoke to a standing room-only (800+) audience in Ramsey Auditorium at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. His topic was “Evolution in the 21st Century,” and you can see his slides here. I don’t know if an audio file will eventually be made available, but here are some observations about the lecture and Q & A:
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’bout time for this BhTV dust-up to exit, stage left. Before it does, however, a few observations:

1. Don’t worry, Bob, George, Sean, Carl, et al. — “respectability” is not transitive.

If it were, what Francis Bacon (1620) called “the kingdom of opinions” would be a lot more fluid than it is. Let’s suppose A knows B, and B knows C. And let’s define “respectability” as “no smart person I admire will ever think I’m crazy or a crackpot.” Read More ›

Both Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer have resigned as contributors from Bloggingheadstv.com (BhTV). Seems that BhTV founder and editor-in-chief Robert Wright could not assure them that no obviously wrong (crazy) person would appear on the site in the future, like me or (somewhat less crazy) Mike Behe, at least in the science segments.

There’s not a lot to say about this. Like all other humans, scientists use social inclusion and exclusion to mark the boundaries of their community. (I have seen this taken to near-comical extremes. In June 1999, while walking with me on a hillside gravel road to a fossil outcrop in Chengjiang, China, paleontologist David Bottjer turned abruptly on his heel and began walking swiftly in the opposite direction — away from the fossils, and back towards the bus. The reason? I had asked him casually how his day was going.) The whole business reminds one of high school cliques. If she is going to sit here, then I’m moving to another table. Read More ›

Their chat is here. I don’t think Bloggingheads science regulars Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer (who complained publicly and behind the scenes about my Bloggingheads segment with Ron Numbers) are going to like this.

PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne both commented on the Numbers-Nelson Bloggingheads exchange. Some comments on their comments:

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Go here. Ron goes after Coyne and Dawkins for promoting atheism; I talk about living in a trailer park (so to speak). Watch the whole thing while you clean up your office — that’s how I watch Bloggingheads on Saturday morning, when John Horgan and George Johnson usually hold court — and post a comment or two.

Steve Meyer’s new book from HarperOne, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, will be in bookstores next week. The book’s companion website, www.signatureinthecell.com, is now live. Check it out.

(an announcement from Professor David Snoke:) Upcoming event: “Grill the ID Scientist” Tuesday, June 9 7 PM, University of Pittsburgh Campus (room TBA) A network of scientists known as the Intelligent Design (ID) community continues to question basic tenets of Darwinism and origin-of-life scenarios. Not only are their views controversial in scientific circles — many in the evangelical world, who might be expected to embrace ID, are also not sold on the value of the ID program. This event brings together a panel of scientists associated with the ID movement. After a short presentation, the bulk of the evening will be given to questions from the audience. This event is aimed primarily at researchers, graduate students and advanced undergrad students Read More ›

Here’s a fascinating, anonymous account of the recent (Saturday, February 21, 2009) debate between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett at the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA), in Chicago. The account is anonymous because the writer wishes to protect his academic career from discrimination — itself a fact worth noting about the current climate.

To take the quiz — or to play along — here’s your background information, and no cheating by looking into cell biology textbooks or using Google or PubMed. 1. Topoisomerases are essential enzymes, found in all organisms, which solve topological problems arising from the double-helical structure of DNA. Now, assume: 2. All organisms on Earth share a common ancestor, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). OK — quiz time. Given (1) and (2), what should we expect to find, with respect to the homology of topoisomerases, when we examine organisms descended from LUCA in different parts of the Tree of Life? Multiple choice: A) Homologous topoisomerases B) Non-homologous topoisomerases C) Can’t say. Make your best guess, and then go here: Read More ›

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Or course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well…Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ — Syme, the Newspeak editor, in George Orwell’s 1984 Biologists should no longer use the word “design,” urges evolutionary biologist Walter Bock of Columbia University, in a newly-published article, as this word and its related concepts bring with them “connotations that are undesirable or unwanted” (p. 8). Biologists should “drop all usages Read More ›

Eugene V. Koonin, “Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics,” Nucleic Acids Research 2009, 1-24. The overall pattern of life’s history, he argues, may be a Forest, not a single Tree of Life [TOL]: Evolutionary genomics effectively demolished the straightforward concept of the TOL by revealing the dynamic, reticulated character of evolution where HGT, genome fusion, and interaction between genomes of cellular life forms and diverse selfish genetic elements take the central stage. In this dynamic worldview, each genome is a palimpsest, a diverse collection of genes with different evolutionary fates and widely varying likelihoods of being lost, transferred, or duplicated. So the TOL becomes a network, or perhaps, most appropriately, the Forest of Life that consists of trees, bushes, Read More ›

A few relevant facts for those who shoot from the hip, without thinking: 1. Reporters and writers don’t contribute or control article headlines, a privilege their editors reserve to themselves. 2. Nor do reporters and writers have much (or any) say about what goes on the magazine cover. See the editors for that. 3. Graham Lawton was reporting on scientific developments and arguments that have been underway for more than a decade (although accelerating recently). Go here, for instance, for a summary of a recent meeting reviewing those developments. Lawton interviewed some of the participants at this meeting — as a science journalist, not a partisan. The point is, if Lawton didn’t report the story, the story would still be Read More ›

Here’s the story from today’s London Telegraph, and here is a related, more in-depth piece on the same question from the latest New Scientist. While Darwin argued for a single Tree — probably the most powerful image he introduced into biological perception — he was always cagey about the structure of its root. Life was “originally breathed [‘by the Creator,’ added in the 2nd edition of the Origin] into a few forms or into one” (1859, 490). There’s a world of (inferential / phylogenetic) difference, however, between divinely created first life and naturally arising first life, when the single most important question in the latter scenario concerns the probability of abiogenesis. “A few forms” that independently evolved (say) ribosomal structure, Read More ›

One cause (of many) delaying the completion of On Common Descent, my monograph examining the theory of the universal common ancestry of life on Earth — Darwin’s monophyletic Tree of Life, rooted in LUCA (the last universal common ancestor) — has been the explosion of publication on the topic. In 1998, when I submitted my dissertation, only a handful of researchers openly doubted monophyly, and only generally-known-to-be-crazy philosophers of science, like me, cared much about it. Now an international workshop series on the question has been organized, to culminate in a major meeting in London in July 2010. The first workshop in the series was held on November 7th, 2008, at the Philosophy of Science Association biennial conference, in Pittsburgh. Read More ›