Posted by Nick Matzke on April 28, 2005 | Comments (57) | TrackBack (0)

This morning, NPR is reporting that the legendary Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, long thought to be extinct, has been rediscovered in Arkansas (see photo of a model reconstructing the event at left, hosted in the CNN story).  NPR did a detailed radio expedition story and interviewed the players.  These are a large number of seasoned, professional birders, well aware of the bigfoot phenomenon and the similar woodpecker species, the pilleated woodpecker, and they think they’ve found it.  Evidently this has been cooking for several months, but the word recently leaked out, and a paper has been rushed to the online edition of Science.

It would be great if this were true.  I want it to be true.  Several independent professional observers say it is true.  But I gotta say, I just read the paper (Fitzpatrick et al. “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America, free online”), looked at the supplementary material, and watched the video, and I’ve got a bad feeling that hopes are going to be dashed again.  What they’ve put up in terms of data is scans of field notes and a detailed analysis of one very short video that is being interpreted right at the limits of its resolution.  They don’t have audio recordings, and the digital photo they have is a photo of model in a “reconstruction” of the video observation.  Hopefully my utterly amateur opinion is wrong, and the professionals are right, but with this much psychic energy pushing for the existence of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, it pays to be extra-careful.

Posted by Nick Matzke on April 17, 2005 | Comments (146) | TrackBack (1)

Are phyla “real”?  Is there really a well-defined “number of animal phyla” extant and in the fossil record?  Does the term “bodyplan” or “bauplan” have any consistent definition?  Many paleontologists, notably Stephen Jay Gould (1989, Wonderful Life), have written books that take these concepts for granted, and, observing charts with many animal phyla appearing in the Cambrian, and few appearing afterwards, have reached the conclusion that there was something extra-special and unique about the Cambrian “explosion”.  Creationists, both the traditional and “intelligent design” variety, have been only to happy to put their own spin on this situation, and argue that God, for reasons that remain obscure, engaged in a particularly active period of special creation for a few dozen million years back in the Cambrian.  Recent examples include Stephen Meyer’s hopeless paper “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories”, the three or so previously-published versions of that paper, and Paul Nelson’s work in general (see a recent powerpoint presentation).

Continue reading  “Down with phyla!”

Posted by Nick Matzke on March 30, 2005 | Comments (68) | TrackBack (0)

Today an interesting editorial was published: Michelle M. Simmons, “Why opposing evolution resonates with some,” The Patriot-News, March 30, 2005. It is not the full history of antievolution — Herbert Spencer, the Seventh Day Adventists, and World War I are also important — but worth reading if you haven’t thought about the history before (see Ronald Numbers, The Creationists, for much more).

Continue reading  “Scopes II and Scopes I”

Posted by Nick Matzke on March 24, 2005 | Comments (51) | TrackBack (1)

The possible discovery of a non-Mendelian form of inheritance in the tiny mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana — the lab rat of the plant world — has hit the news in a big way this week.  See e.g. Carl Zimmer’s blog post “Move Over, Mendel (But Don’t Move Too Far)”, the New York Times story “Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene,” a blurb from the NSF, “Cress overturns textbook genetics” at Nature News, and the actual March 24 Nature article, Lolle et al. (2005), “Genome-wide non-mendelian inheritance of extra-genomic information in Arabidopsis,” Nature, 434, 505-509.

Basically, there is a gene, HOTHEAD, abbreviated HTH, and the recessive null mutant of this gene, hth, produces plants with fused flowers.  When HTH/hth heterozygotes are self-fertilized, the progeny phenotypes are 75% normal and 25% mutant, as Mendelian genetics predicts.  However, when hth/hth plants are self-fertilized, instead of producing 100% hth phenotypes, up to 10% of the progeny are HTH/hth and have the HTH phenotype.

As Project Steve Steve Steven Jacobsen put it in Nature News: “It’s really weird.”

Continue reading  “Mendel overturned, or just more Darwin?”

Posted by Nick Matzke on July 08, 2004 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

Are you ravenous for information? Today's issue of Nature announces that Nature has created a central science news service, . Anyone with a subscription to any Nature journal (or a university subscription) can access all of the news, anyone at all can subscribe to the free daily news service, and everyone can try the whole thing out for free for two months at http://www.nature.com/news.

It’s quite handy.  Just today I discovered that adaptive immune systems have evolved not once, but at least twice — once in the jawed vertebrates, and again, in an entirely different way, in their sister group, the lampreys (left).  You may recall that Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe listed the adaptive immune system as one of several “irreducibly complex” systems that supposedly scientists had no idea how to explain with evolution.  This was debunked in rather excruciating detail a few years ago, but it is worth pointing out that every month brings out new discoveries filling in details on the evolution of the vertebrate immune system.