I’ll be participating in this three-day seminar on Darwinism and design at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in the heart of São Paulo. Mackenzie is one of the oldest and most distinguished private universities in Brazil, and they’ve invited Brazilians scientists, such as evolutionary geneticist Dr. Aldo Mellender de Araújo, to participate in the event. Looking forward to some Brazilian sunshine, after an interminable Chicago winter…
Yes, tonight. April 1, 7:00 PM, the Wisconsin Room (second level, #E245) of the Student Union at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My speaking partner will be Professor Angus Menuge, a philosopher of science who will be debating P.Z. Myers in a few weeks.
Sounds like the title of a bad horror movie, but it’s true. Run. All right, you can walk. The link above takes you to a pdf of page 110 of Donald Prothero’s new book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Prothero argues that “all vertebrate embryos start out with a long tail, well-developed gill slits, and many other fish-like features” (p. 108). Thus, he continues, “to the limited extent that von Baer had shown 40 years earlier,” Haeckel’s biogenetic law — ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny — “is true.” Except sometimes it’s not: But embryos also have many unique features (yolk sac, allantois, amniotic membranes, umbilical cords) that have nothing to do with Read More ›
HT to Larry Moran’s Sandwalk for the link to this fascinating long piece by journalist Suzan Mazur about an upcoming (July 2008) evolution meeting at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria. “The Altenberg 16” is Mazur’s playful term for the sixteeen biologists and theoreticians invited by organizer Massimo Pigliucci. Most are on record as being, to greater and lesser degrees, dissatisfied with the current textbook theory of evolution. Surveying the group, I note that I’ve interacted with several of the people over the years, as have other ID theorists and assorted Bad Guys. This should be an exciting meeting, with the papers to be published in 2009 by MIT Press. Mazur’s article is worth your attention. Evolutionary theory is Read More ›
For those following this thread at the Panda’s Thumb, I’m providing here (as a pdf) the slides from my talk at the Wistar Retrospective meeting, held this past June in Woburn, Massachusetts. Pay attention to the puzzle described in slides 14-21. Here’s a brief outline of the problem: 1. To establish cellular differentiation in a metazoan (i.e., an animal), instructions must be provided to the starting cell. 2. Natural selection is one possible process by which this occurred, when the metazoan in question first appeared. 3. A necessary condition for natural selection is reproductive capability. 4. But reproductive capability (in an animal) requires cellular differentiation. 5. Thus, a necessary condition for natural selection lies causally downstream from the phenotypic outcome Read More ›
Alignment is probably the most difficult and least understood component of a phylogenetic analysis from sequence data. — David L. Swofford and Gary J. Olsen, chapter on Phylogeny Reconstruction, in Molecular Systematics (Sinauer, 1990, eds. D.M. Hillis and C. Moritz), p. 417. Twenty years ago, as a 2nd-year graduate student, I attended the first Molecular Evolution Workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory-Woods Hole. (There’s a comical Expelled-type story from my two weeks there, involving the workshop director Mitchell Sogin, which I might tell here some time. I did design the workshop t-shirt, however, which most of the participants bought.) The overwhelming lesson I brought home from the workshop, aside from the pricey beauty of that part of Cape Cod, was Read More ›
And don’t use Google, you cheaters! That’s not guessing. Both passages — arguments about possible modes of evolutionary change — were written by the same scientist. He is offering his own view, not expounding that of others. Sample 1: In real life, major evolutionary innovations perhaps had to wait for radical mutational ‘inventions’ that fundamentally altered the basic body plan. Once such a radical change in body plan had arisen, a whole new rush of evolution became possible. An example might be the invention of segmentation early in the ancestral history of annelid worms, arthropods and vertebrates. Sample 2: My suggestion is that Scyllarus may actually present an example in the wild of a homeotic mutation, analogous to antennapedia in Read More ›
Looking at a cell is like looking into the future of our own designs. That’s my favorite sentence from The Design Matrix by Mike Gene (a book from which I took copious notes, and am still digesting). But the reason there’s a picture of biologist George Church in this blog entry, not to mention a quote from Church as the title, is the release by editor John Brockman of the transcript of a fascinating roundtable about the nature of life. Held this past August at Brockman’s farm in Connecticut, the roundtable ranges over a wide array of topics, including intelligent design, synthetic biology, the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, and the effect of the genomics revolution on the Read More ›
Go here for a striking illusion, i.e., to see what happens when these pictures are turned right side up. That’s Tania in the pictures, btw. OK, so I had titled this entry “Tania Lombrozo, I Love You,” but that was more than a tad over the top (and anyway my heart belongs to this woman forever). Nevertheless I cannot help but feel a surge of intellectual affection — philia — at learning that someone is trying to understand the puzzle of when and why humans infer intelligent design, or more generally, default to teleological modes of explanation, whether correctly or not. (It’s that last bit that should be very useful to design theorists; see below.) Tania Lombrozo is an assistant Read More ›
I’ll be speaking on the topic, “Does the Complexity of Life Prove Intelligent Design?” at two schools in New York this week. The first lecture will take place at the University of Buffalo’s North Campus, in Cooke Hall, Room 121, on Thursday, November 8th at 8:00 pm. For directions to this location click here. I will also be lecturing a second time on Friday, November 9th at 6:30 pm at Daemen College in the Wick Center Social Room. For directions to this location, click here. I’d love to meet you, UD reader, if you have the time to stop by.
As an undergraduate studying evolutionary biology — like many other such students, I suppose — I read Will Provine’s classic The Origin of Theoretical Population Genetics (University of Chicago Press, 1971), a standard history of the laying of the mathematical and conceptual foundations, in the work of Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, of what later came to be known as the Evolutionary Synthesis (i.e., textbook neo-Darwinism). When Chicago reissued the book in 2001, Provine added a remarkable Afterword. With characteristic candor, he wrote that “my views have changed dramatically.” Natural selection, for instance, Provine no longer saw as a “force” or “mechanism” of any kind: Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, Read More ›
In a provocative article in the latest London Review of Books (18 October 2007), philosopher of science and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor of Rutgers University argues that “the classical Darwinist account of evolution as primarily driven by natural selection is in trouble on both conceptual and empirical grounds.” As he elaborates, The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn’t what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow Read More ›
Posted without comment. Too busy today: the paper and reviewers’ reports are open access, so check it out. I’ll have more to say tomorrow. Well, one quick comment. Could Mike Behe or Scott Minnich (to name a couple of my ID friends) have published this paper? — not in the sense of having written and submitted the text, however. Rather, could they have made it through refereeing?
“Yeah, so what. So I spend a lot of time at this one Starbucks, sure, when other organ systems are busy working. Venti dark roast, room for cream.” “Doesn’t mean I don’t put in my time on the job.” “Do you really think natural selection would have kept me on the payroll this long if I wasn’t doing something?”
That’s the thesis of a deeply interesting paper by Momme von Sydow, cognitive psychologist and philosopher of science at the University of Göttingen. In his analysis, “Charles Darwin – A Christian Undermining Christianity? (in D.M. Knight and M.D. Eddy, eds., Science and Belief: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 [Burlington: Ashgate, 2005], pp. 141-156), von Sydow shows how the construction of Darwin’s theory “essentially hinges on religious or metaphysical tenets” (p. 141). These tenets, “which initially appeared to him to have strong ethical and religious appeal” (p. 155), were the following: …three of the main influences on Darwin’s biological theory which had a direct or indirect religious origin: Paley’s belief in the divine design of nature, secondly, the conviction Read More ›