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Category Archives: Evolution
Ardipithecus at the Loom
Carl Zimmer has a great piece out on the newest (oldest?) addition to the hominid family tree. 
The fossil evidence for the shift to human- like family structures is one of the many compelling aspects of the find:
Men have stubby canines, which many scientists take as a sign that the competition between males became less intense in our hominid lineage. That was likely due to a shift in family life. Male chimpanzees compete with each other to mate with females, but they don’t help with the kids when they’re born. Humans form long-term bonds, with fathers helping mothers by, for example, getting more food for the kids to eat. There’s still male-male competition in our lineage, but it’s a lot less intense than in other species.
White and his colleagues found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.
Evolution by Guinness
Forget natural selection. It’s all about the next pint.
non random Change over time we can believe in «
Wallace in National Geographic Magazine
I was pleased to see the current National geographic features an essay by David Quammen on Alfred Russel Wallace, the (relatively)unsung hero of evolutionary theory. 
A young man of modest means pursuing his interest in natural history and finding a path to the origin of species independent of Darwin. His paper spurred Darwin to publish his long incubating treatise on natural selection, and changed the world.
Wallace — National Geographic Magazine:
That man was Alfred Russel Wallace, a young English naturalist who did fieldwork throughout the Malay Archipelago in the late 1850s and early '60s. What you won't see on Ternate is any grand plaque or statue commemorating Wallace's place in scientific history or the fact that, from this little island, on March 9, 1858, he sent off a highly consequential letter, aboard a Dutch mail steamer headed westward. The letter was addressed to Mr. Charles Darwin. Along with it Wallace enclosed a brief paper titled "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type." It was the product of two nights' hasty scribbling, which followed a moment's epiphany during a fever, which in turn followed more than ten years of speculation and careful research. What the paper described was a theory of evolution (though not under that name) by natural selection (not using that phrase) remarkably similar to the theory that Darwin himself, then an eminent naturalist of rather conventional reputation, had developed but hadn't yet published.
3-legged cows absent in fossil record – Darwin weeps
Via Pharyngula this has got to be one of the stupidest frickin’ things I have read in awhile:
Link: Pat Sullivan Blog: Evolution: What should life look like?.
Why would macro evolution somehow take primordial soup and create thru random means this amazingly diverse world we observe and then STOP? I suppose it can be argued it is because of the massive amount of time and the last 5,000 years is just a nit in time. But that seems irrelevant to me. Regardless of where we are on the spectrum of time, there ought to be massive numbers of obvious, incomplete transitional forms for us to observe. e,g, cows with 3 legs and a partial 4th still in the process of evolving. Multiply that across tens of millions of species. The amount of macro evolution we should be observing ought to be massive. And yet there essentially is nothing.
Yes, this fellow is claiming that evolutionary theory, if true, would predict a 3 legged cow as a precursor to a 4 legged cow. This genius doesn’t even follow his own logic to a natural conclusion i.e. that our current 4 legged cows are just steps on the way to an even more complete 5-legged version. What a maroon.
Update: Evolution in Action! Take that Sullivan!
Did he really say that?
Disappointing: globeandmail.com: Creationism raised as Ont. election issue.
TORONTO — Publicly-funded religious schools would be allowed to teach creationism and other theories, says Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory.
Speaking to reporters at the a Jewish day school in Thornhill, Ont., on Wednesday, Mr. Tory defended his plan to bring Jewish, Islamic and other religious schools into the public education system.
“They teach evolution in the Ontario curriculum, but they also could teach the fact to the children that there are other theories that people have out there that are part of some Christian beliefs,” Mr. Tory said at the Kamin Education Centre.
While I could understand him supporting creationism within a course of religious instruction, the linking of ID or creationism to evolution in a science curriculum should cost Tory the election.
Update: He clarifies:
In clarifying his remarks yesterday, Mr. Tory said: "The Ontario
curriculum teaches evolution and that is the curriculum that would have
to be taught in the faith-based and all other schools that receive
public funding. There are other theories that can be taught as part of
religious instruction … But the curriculum is the curriculum."
I’ll take it at face value. I suspect that this is just a gaffe, rooted in some eagerness to pander a bit to his religious voters, and he spoke without thinking.
Creationist Terrorism?
Via Panda’s Thumb, labs and individuals at the University of Colorado have been threatened by a religious group of indeterminate flavour. The Denver Post – Threats by religious group spark probe at CU-Boulder:
University of Colorado police are
investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed
to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the
Boulder campus.The messages included the name of a religious-themed
group and addressed the debate between evolution and creationism, CU
police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said. Wiesley would not identify the group
named because police are still investigating."There were no overt threats to anybody specifically by
name," Wiesley said. "It basically said anybody who doesn’t believe in
our religious belief is wrong and should be taken care of."
Who wants to bet they’re not muslim?
The Extended Phenotype and the Mountain Pine Beetle
For kicks last week I was reading an anti-evolution blog post (cause that’s how I roll) that included the notion, and I paraphrase, "why does all this matter, it’s all in the past, let’s move on". 
Now, the person making that statement was a non-scientist, and there is no shortage of similar nonsense out in the internets by people undisciplined by facts, so why do I note this now? Because coincidently I attended a workshop on forestry genomics where one of the presenters put up the cover of the Extended Phenotype, citing the concept of the gene as the unit of selection, in contrast to the organism, as a way to inform analysis of genomics approaches to the Mountain Pine Beetle disaster here in BC. Having just completed it, mention of the book caught my attention. He went on to say that, from a gene’s perspective,the Pine Beetle is an insect-fungal hybrid, and the complexity of interactions among these genomes and the genome of the host tree as they adapt to each other is key to combating the blight. In other words, a conceptual model based on standard Darwinian theory informs scientific inquiry into a current problem.
This is why good theories (in this case Darwin’s natural selection and Dawkin’s Selfish Gene) persist – they are useful. They generate testable hypotheses and inform research every single day. Unlike intelligent design theory, which is utterly useless in shedding light on any given set of observations.
Alberta creationism museum
Canada now has the unfortunate distinction of its own creationism museum in Big Valley Alberta, for those who, in the words of Warren Kinsella, think the Flintstones is a documentary:
Dinosaurs once walked alongside humans. The bloodline of King Henry
VI of England can be traced back to Adam and Eve. There’s proof in the
dirt beneath Saskatchewan that the biblical flood really happened.And planet Earth is just 6,000 years old, give or take a few centuries.
Walk
through the doors of the Big Valley Creation Science Museum, and you
get a very different version of the planet’s past than gets taught in
most classrooms.Set to open June 5, the 900-sq.-ft. bungalow
offers fossils, models of dinosaurs, multimedia presentations and
professional-looking displays – all designed to poke big holes in the
theory of evolution."This is a scientific museum," said founder
Harry Nibourg, a 46-year-old evangelical who built and stocked the
museum about 200 kilometres northeast of Calgary at a cost of about
$300,000 – mostly out of his own pocket."This is compelling
evidence for a creator. We want people to come take a look at it for
themselves and make up their own minds."Vance Nelson, executive
director of Creation Truth Ministries, offers guided tours. He said
evolution is as much based on "blind faith" as creationism."I
have no problem with survival of the fittest," he said. "But survival
of the fittest does not explain the origin of the fittest."Who
was there to see the Big Bang? (Evolution is) based on presuppositions,
assumptions and biases like all historical theory. Creationism and
evolution are on the same level playing field and should be debated
that way."This is believed to be Canada’s first permanent
creationist museum. There are several in the U.S., including one
opening in Kentucky on Monday that reportedly cost $27 million US to
build.
Critics, meanwhile, say they have no problem with creationism
– but they insist it can’t be called science if it’s based on a
theological concept that can’t be tested."Our goal is to
understand the natural world using what we can see or scientifically
prove," said Heather Addy, an biology instructor at the University of
Calgary."When you invoke a supernatural being as a creator that is not science, and shouldn’t be taught as science."
No kidding.
iBiome 
