Survival of the Silliest

Larry Moran has had a couple of articles up lately on Dr Sharon Moalem, a fellow who has a book out called Survival of the Sickest, and who also has a blog. Larry noticed a couple of things: he’s writing utter tripe about junk DNA, he’s editing and deleting comments about his science from his blog, and he’s been misleading about his credentials — although, to be fair, Moalem does plainly and accurately list his background on the endflaps of the book (some of this has come from a student blog that has been dissecting his dubious claims).

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Padian interview

If you’ve got an hour free, this interview with Kevin Padian is a pleasant listen. The interviewer is a bit of a bore, but Padian is always an intelligent conversationalist — I’d like to have seen a more aggressive counter to some of the silly stuff brought up by the interviewer, but this was not an antagonistic situation so I can also see why the discussion goes in the direction it does. There were a lot of places where I would have said, “Padian is exactly right, but…” — but then I think I’m just intrinsically crankier.

Well, there is a part about halfway through where he says the role of chance is negligible that I would take strong exception to…

Load-bearing adaptation of women’s spines

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Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Those of you who have been pregnant, or have been a partner to someone who has been pregnant, are familiar with one among many common consequences: lower back pain. It’s not surprising—pregnant women are carrying this low-slung 7kg (15lb) weight, and the closest we males can come to the experience would be pressing a bowling ball to our bellybutton and hauling it around with us everywhere we go. This is the kind of load that can put someone seriously out of balance, and one way we compensate for a forward-projecting load is to increase the curvature of our spines (especially the lumbar spine, or lower back), and throw our shoulders back to move our center of mass (COM) back.

Here’s the interesting part: women have changed the shape of individual vertebrae to better enable maintenance of this increased curvature, called lordosis, and fossil australopithecines show a similar variation.

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Evo-devo in 60 seconds

Here’s a useful excercise: can you summarize a key concept in your field in less than a minute? Chris Mims takes a stab at explaining evo-devo — he’s not trying to explain the whole field, actually, but the central concept of a master gene. He uses the analogy of a power strip for a transcription factor, which I like quite a bit, and I’m probably going to have to steal it someday.

Beaten to the vulva

Scooped! I’ve long adored vulvas, having written a few things on how to develop a vulva and how to evolve a vulva, so I’m a little peeved that this upstart at scienceblogs, Greg Laden, has written up a recent story on nematode vulva evolution before me. Aaargh, all vulvas must be mine! I’ve just got too much other work stacked in front of me.

I may have to revisit this story later, though. I made a quick skim of the paper and don’t see quite how they arrived at their conclusion, that vulva evolution is dominated by selective events rather than chance. I can’t say they’re wrong, but I’m going to have to read it more carefully before I can agree with it.

Jebus, no … what a miserable idea

Clive Thompson wants us to simply redefine the “theory of evolution” as the “law of evolution”. This is possibly one of the worst ideas I’ve heard yet for overcoming the problem of the colloquial definition of theory. It is not correct. The theory of evolution is a whole collection of ideas describing complex phenomena; it is not reducible to the kind of clear and simple mathematical description we associate with scientific laws. When somebody asks me what the ideal gas law is, I can say PV=nRT; when someone asks me what the law describing the gravitational attraction between two bodies is, I say Gm1m2/R2; when they say, “OK, smartie pants, what is the law of evolution?”, what am I supposed to do? Recite Hardy-Weinberg at them (which, by the way, is called a law already, but is not the sum of all of evolution by any means)?

It’s a bad idea that sets us up for more confusion and will play right into creationist hands. Why not go all the way and just call it the “Truth of Evolution”? It’s the same strategy — it’s all avoiding the issue by an attempt at redefinition, and mangling the idea in the process.

(Larry Moran sees it the same way I do. He must be a very smart man.)

(And Wilkins was way, way ahead of us both.)

Once more into the Haeckelian morass; or, Peter Moore is an illiterate fool

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but we’ve got a serial spammer in the comments. This twit, calling himself Peter Moore (also known as Ken DeMyer, or Kdbuffalo, as he was known on Wikipedia before being banned there), is repeating himself over and over again, asking the same stupid question, never satisfied with any answer anyone gives him. Forty nine insipid comments in three days is enough.

I will answer him one last time. Any further attempt to spam multiple comment threads with his demands (and this alone makes him an ass: an incompetent, unqualified hack like Moore is in no position to make demands) will result in his immediate banning.

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How to evolve a watch

Here’s an interesting thought and modeling experiment: how to evolve a watch, literally.

As an example, it’s nice, but there are also real biological examples of organisms evolving clocks — evolution of the period gene, for instance, which also shows evidence of being calibrated to day lengths by natural processes, or the somitic clock. Most organisms on the planet seem to have multiple clocks built right into them, and they’ve all evolved.

(via No More Mr. Nice Guy!)