Laelaps (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
A simplified, silhouette version of the "March of Progress." The "March of Progress", the iconic evolutionary image of an ancestral ape transforming into a proud, tool-wielding human, is not going anywhere. There is perhaps no other illustration that is as immediately recognizable as representing evolution, but the tragedy of this is that it conveys a view of life that does not...
Thoughts from Kansas (Free subscription) | 10/28/2009
You may recall Martin Cothran from our fight over whether Pat Buchanan is a racist and a Holocaust denier , and from his guest-blogging gigs at the Discovery Institute, and through his other attempts to abuse logic for partisan purposes. Not content to push creationism with the Disco. 'Tute and other forms of evangelical Christianity through Kentucky's affiliate of Focus on the Family, he now is promoting...
Gristmill (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
by Russ Walker Tim Flannery says the U.S. Senate absolutely must pass some form of carbon cap before the Copenhagen talks in December.Mark Coulson, 5th World Conference of Science JournalistsDon’t let the perfect be the enemy of the absolutely essential. That’s the message author and climate campaigner Tim Flannery brought to Grist’s Seattle office today. By that, he means: The U.S....
The Archdruid Report (Free subscription) | 08/27/2009
The relation between modern industrial society and the scientific ideas that supposedly guide it is more complex than a casual glance will necessarily reveal. The ideology a society believes that it embraces and the assumptions about the world that actually underlie its actions and institutions are not uncommonly at odds with one another. It often takes the most strenuous sort of willed inattention...
Gene Expression (Free subscription) | 08/24/2009
A month ago Larry Moran made reference to Fern Elsdon Baker's new book, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy . Moran was a bit disappointed by the previews, his pet hobby-horse being the revolutionary impact of the neutral theory of molecular evolution , while Elsdon-Baker seems rather fixated on the potential of Neo-Lamarckism , especially epigenetics. Well, I've read the...
Aardvarchaeology (Free subscription) | 08/17/2009
Sean B. Carroll's latest book has been sitting on my reading shelf (and been read by my wife) for over four months, but now I've finally read it. Remarkable Creatures is a collection of mini-biographies of people who have made important discoveries in evolutionary biology. I won't mention names, but we've got both of the scientists who discovered evolution, the guy who discovered mimicry, the man...
Laelaps (Free subscription) | 07/21/2009
Mentioning Richard Dawkins is a quick way to polarize a conversation. One acquaintance once told me that she refused to read anything by Stephen Jay Gould because of Dawkins' criticisms while, on the other hand, many of my friends have voiced their exasperation with the English biologist's attacks on religion. Regardless of whether you consider him a saint or a sinner, though, Dawkins is one of the...
Laelaps (Free subscription) | 07/03/2009
On the 31st of May, 1984, the late evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith appraised the field of paleontology in the journal Nature . The report was a critical summary of a series of lectures Stephen Jay Gould had given at Cambridge, and Gould considered it "the kindest and most supportive critical commentary I have ever received." Smith wrote; The attitude of population geneticists to...
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