Posted by PZ Myers on February 26, 2005 | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

Here's a brief teaser:

Amniote penises have had a complex history. They have evolved independently multiple times, and perhaps most troubling to the male ego, they have been secondarily lost at least a few times. And every time they have evolved, they converge on a remarkably similar morphological solution.

If you want to find out more, read the rest on Pharyngula.

Posted by Dave Thomas on February 25, 2005 | Comments (311) | TrackBack (0)

We’ve all heard the Creationist refrain (also a Dennis Miller joke), “If humans evolved from Monkeys, Why are there still Monkeys?”

See http://our.homewithgod.com/whereeaglesdare/darwin.htm for a badly spelled example:

Darwin claims that because we are similar to monkeys in some ways, then we must have evolved from them. So whay are there still monkeys around then?

This aphorism is also discussed here, here, here, here, here,  and most bizarrely here.

As a Friday Treat, I’m posting a Torte and a Re-Torte about this curious argument.

Have a great weekend!
-Dave

Posted by Jason Rosenhouse on February 24, 2005 | Comments (312) | TrackBack (1)

George Diepenbrock is a reporter for the Southwest Daily Times, a newspaper in Kansas. At the conclusion of this recent article about the latest evolution dust-up in Kansas, he offers the following challenge to those who wish to keep ID out of science classrooms:

This scares opponents to death because they are more worried about Kansas gaining criticism from national media as it did in 1999.

Instead opponents should come up with a good argument on why teaching only the evolution theory does not violate the state education science mission statement to make all students lifelong learners who can use science to make reasoned decisions.

Presenting only one life science theory in classes without alternatives breeds ignorance and violates the mission statement.

I have answered his challenge in this blog entry over at EvolutionBlog. Whether I have answered successfully I will leave to others to decide.

Posted by Nick Matzke on February 24, 2005 | Comments (163) | TrackBack (3)

Apparently, the regular procedures for science standards revisions in Kansas have not been going well for ID advocates.  They lost on the science standards committee — the group of Kansas scientists and educators that were appointed to revise Kansas’s science standards. 

And they lost in the four public hearings on the science standards that occurred in Kansas during February.  At these hearings, it became clear that the only people who favored the 20+ pages of revisions promoted by the Kansas “Intelligent Design Network” were straight-up creationists who want God inserted into biology classes.

Now, at the last minute, they have hatched a plan to put evolution on trial for 10 days, with no standards of evidence, none of the rules found in a normal trial, no rules for what counts as a “scientist” or an “expert”, and no limitation that the “witnesses” be from Kansas.  Undoubtedly what is planned is that the Discovery Institute circus of philosophers, lawyers, and a few scientists who’ve never managed to publish original research confirming “intelligent design” will invade Kansas and attempt to give their pseudoscience some thin illusion of respectability.

Unfortunately, I’m not making this up…Read the news story:

Continue reading  “ID advocates set up Kangaroo Court in Kansas”

Posted by PZ Myers on February 24, 2005 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The 22^nd edition of the Tangled Bank is now up and ready for reading!

There was one unfortunate problem this time around. It seems that gmail decided that this bozo (umm, me) who was constantly forwarding links to Selva must be some kind of spammer, and started filtering me out. A small heap of recent submissions got thrown into the junk mail pile, so if you sent something in and it isn't there, don't worry, it wasn't that anyone thought you weren't worthy…it was gmail deciding that I wasn't worthy.

Anyway, they have all been recovered. What I think I'll do is put them into a special post this weekend, a kind of temporary tributary of the Tangled Bank, so you'll actually get two collections of science posts this week. Hooray!

New submissions should be sent to grrlscientist@yahoo.com, me, or host@tangledbank.net, for appearance at Living the Scientific Life on 9 March.

9 March is my birthday, by the way, and if anyone wants to get me something special, a link to a lovely science article on the web would be just perfect!

Posted by Dave Thomas on February 23, 2005 | Comments (90) | TrackBack (0)

There’s an interesting piece by Jim Holt in the February 20th, 2005 issue of New York Times magazine, entitled “Unintelligent Design.”  Holt makes some interesting observations, like this one:

In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

He also says something quite curious about Michael Behe:

But what if the designer did not style each species individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has suggested. Behe says that the little protein machines in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation — an opinion that his scientific peers overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind chance. (emphasis added)

I’m curious, Thumbers and Lurkers - do you think this is a correct statement of Behe’s views?

Thanks, Dave

Posted by PvM on February 23, 2005 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)

From our friends at the NCSE

Chris Mooney reports in The American Prospect that John H. Marburger III, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, denounced “intelligent design” as unscientific. Mooney writes:

Speaking at the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers, Marburger fielded an audience question about “Intelligent Design” (ID), the latest supposedly scientific alternative to Charles Darwin’s theory of descent with modification. The White House’s chief scientist stated point blank, “Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory.” And that’s not all — as if to ram the point home, Marburger soon continued, “I don’t regard Intelligent Design as a scientific topic.”

In March 2004, when asked about the Bush administration’s scientific credibility in light of the president’s reported skepticism about evolution, Marburger similarly got it right: “Evolution is a cornerstone of modern biology.”

Posted by Mark Perakh on February 23, 2005 | Comments (89) | TrackBack (0)

Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box is one of the most popular and extensively reviewed books promoting intelligent design “theory.” The concept of “irreducible complexity” propagandized in that book has been touted by Behe and other intelligent design advocates as a great discovery and used as one of the main tools in their efforts to “destroy Darwinism” (the goal openly announced by such “leading lights” of intelligent design as Phillip Johnson [1991] and Jonathan Wells [2002]).

Irreducible complexity, according to “design theorists,” implies intelligent design of biological system. In fact, such a conclusion lacks a logical foundation. Irreducible complexity can even more reasonably be construed as an argument against intelligent design.

Continue reading  “Beyond Suboptimality: Logical Fallacy of Behe's "IC means ID" Notion”

Posted by PZ Myers on February 22, 2005 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

What do you know…just last week, I posted an article dismissing a creationist's misconceptions about pharyngeal organization and development, in which he asks about the evidence for similarities between agnathan and gnathostome jaws, and what comes along but a new paper on the molecular evidence for the origin of the jaw, which describes gene expression in the lamprey pharynx. How timely! And as a plus, it contains several very clear summary diagrams to show how all the bits and pieces and molecules relate to one another.

The short summary is that there is a suite of genes (the Hox and Dlx genes, which define a cartesian coordinate system for the branchial arch elements, Fgf8/Dlx1 genes that establish proximal jaw elements, and Bmp4/Msx1 genes that demarcate more distal elements) that are found in both lampreys and vertebrates in similar patterns and roles, and that vertebrate upper and lower jaws are homologous to the upper and lower "lips" of the lamprey oral supporting apparatus.

Continue reading "Evolution of the jaw" (on Pharyngula)

Posted by Tara Smith on February 22, 2005 | Comments (158) | TrackBack (1)

Every now and then, I check in over at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) to see what new projects they’re up to, as well as to see if they’ve released a particular genome sequence I’m waiting on.  Yesterday I noticed this project:

Innovative Metagenomics Strategy Used To Study Oral Microbes

Rockville, MD - The mouth is awash in microbes, but scientists so far have merely scratched the surface in identifying and studying the hundreds of bacteria that live in biofilm communities that stick to the teeth and gums.

In an innovative new project that could help improve the detection and treatment of oral diseases, scientists are now using a metagenomics strategy to analyze the complex and difficult-to-study community of microbes in the oral cavity.

***

In recent years, molecular methods have indicated that there are well over 400 species of bacteria in the oral cavity. But, so far, only about 150 of those species have been cultured in laboratories and given scientific names. Using a metagenomics sequencing strategy, TIGR scientists will be able to identify bits and pieces of the DNA of many of those oral microbes that so far have not been grown in labs and studied.

Now, I know that there are an insane amount of microbes in the mouth, but 400 species? Holy cow.

Continue reading  “Plaque--evidence for Design!”

Posted by PZ Myers on February 21, 2005 | Comments (107) | TrackBack (1)

The usual creationist suspects are babbling in the comments to my article on textbook stickers, and throwing aside the usual empty apologetics and assertions that they are promoting secular atheism and weird claims about Jefferson and bizarre ideas that Einstein 'proved' Newton wrong, the only interesting argument is that scientists ought not to be distressed at a declaration that our knowledge is provisional and subject to revision, and that students should keep an open mind. The answer is that we aren't distressed at all by that; in fact, our textbooks already say it over and over, and typically have long chapters that introduce the scientific method and describe how it works and what its limitations are.

For instance, Campbell's Biology, fourth edition, has an extensive section on the hypothetico-deductive method, and comes right out and says it explicitly:

Even the most thoroughly tested hypotheses are accepted only conditionally, pending further investigation.

Continue reading  “Those bogus textbook sticker arguments…”

Posted by PZ Myers on February 20, 2005 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The next edition of the Tangled Bank will be posted at The Scientific Indian on Wednesday, 23 February…so this is the time to send your links to Selva, me, or to host@tangledbank.net.

Also, while we've got our future hosts booked up into May, we're always looking for new volunteers. Send me a note if you'd like to get on the roster.

Posted by Timothy Sandefur on February 20, 2005 | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

We often complain about the awful state of science journalism. Turns out there's a panel discussion on the subject in Washington D.C. on Sunday, and the public is all invited. (On the panel, one of my favorite science writers, Reason's Ronald Bailey.)