If you’re looking for a meaty weekend read, look no further than Paul McBride’s thorough dismantling of Science and Human Origins, the new bad book from the Discovery Institute, by Gauger, Axe, and Luskin. It’s in 6 parts, taking on each chapter one by one: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, a prediction about what …
Category Archive: Evolution
Jul 20 2012
Forever disappointed
I always have unwarrantedly high expectations of creationists. I know that there are some flamingly ignorant nutjobs out there, all your Hams and Hovindses and Luskins, but lurking in my mind is always this suspicion that somewhere there has to be one or two biologically competent ideologues on their side of the fence. And I …
Jul 19 2012
This is why I could never be an anthropologist
Somedays, it’s just awful to have the mind of a 12 year old boy. So I’m reading this serious and interesting paper on Neandertals, and learn something new. Two particular characteristics have received considerable attention; pronounced humeral diaphysis strength asymmetry and anteroposteriorly strengthened humeral diaphyseal shape. In particular, humeral bilateral asymmetry for cross-sectional area, and …
Jul 18 2012
Watch out for the GMWs: Genetically Modified Women
I’ve been hoping that someone would come out and explain how this claim that women are becoming smarter than men was accomplished. I need to know the scenario and the mechanism, so I’ve developed a few of my own that I hope to see appearing soon in the Daily Mail. Late at night, when no …
Jul 12 2012
Brains and beaks
I’m always telling people you need to understand development to understand the evolution of form, because development is what evolution modifies to create change. For example, there are two processes most people have heard of. One is paedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood — a small face and large cranium are features of …
Jul 11 2012
Swimming in the Cambrian
If you ever get a chance, spend some time looking at fish muscles in a microscope. Larval zebrafish are perfect; they’re transparent and you can trace all the fibers, so you can see everything. The body musculature of fish is most elegantly organized into repeating blocks of muscle along the length of the animal, each …
Jun 24 2012
The curse of the gingers
Red hair. Freckles. Pale skin. Soulless. What good are they? Seriously — I have a red-haired son and brother and cousins, and you’ve got to wonder why evolution has spawned all these strange color variants — there’s no known advantage to ginger-ness, and plenty of disadvantages.
Jun 20 2012
I may have to steal this talk
I’ve been working up a science talk for the fall — I am going to do a basic review of many the mechanisms other than selection that contribute to evolution for lay audiences. And then I discover that T. Ryan Gregory has already done some of the work for me. Maybe I should just plagiarize …
Jun 18 2012
Pinker explains Group Selection
I found this very satisfying: Steven Pinker summarizes all the problems with group selection. It’s a substantial essay, but if you just want the gist of it, here’s the conclusion. The idea of Group Selection has a superficial appeal because humans are indisputably adapted to group living and because some groups are indisputably larger, longer-lived, …
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