Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
That’s my hypothesis, and I’m sticking to it. My obnoxious, curmudgeonly ways must be an adaptation, selected by evolution over many generations to optimize my mating opportunities by forcing stupid people to flee from my presence.
JBS Haldane is said to have responded to a question about how evolution could be disproved by saying, “A Precambrian rabbit”. What was meant by this, of course, is any substantial discovery that greatly disrupted the evidence for the chronological pattern of descent observed in Earth’s life. That pattern of descent is one of the central lines of evidence for evolution, so creationists would dearly love to find something that wrecked it — this is why they send expeditions to Africa to find a living dinosaur, Mok’ele-mbembe, or more conveniently, to Canada in search of a plesiosaur, Manipogo.
The Discovery Institute has it easy. They don’t mount expeditions, they just sit around, read scientific papers, and misinterpret them. Their latest abuse is to claim to have discovered the equivalent of a Precambrian rabbit.
I am reassured. My usual sleep pattern is to go to bed around 11 or 12, and then I wake up around 5 and rather sluggishly amble towards alertness. But lately, after having that pattern disrupted by travel, I’ve been going to bed earlier, then waking up around 3am and either struggling to get back to sleep or getting up and reading, and then getting a few more hours of sleep, waking up around 7.
I was getting a little worried that this was a sign of incipient insomnia, but I seem to be getting enough sleep…and then I read about human sleep patterns in the absence of artificial light. Well, cool. It turns out that if you don’t keep yourself awake late into the dark hours you naturally fall into a pattern of waking for a while in the early hours of the morning.
That’s actually encouraging. I’ve been lying abed, annoyed at waking and trying to sleep harder, as silly as that sounds, but now I’m going to take advantage of those 2:30am conscious periods to get up and get something done.
It’s a nice surprise anyway: Nature Education published my article explaining synteny with cards. I don’t even recall getting asked, but then no one complains when Nature uses your work.
I made the mistake of reading some of the comments on those last youtube videos. There were some good ones, but they were also laced with the usual grunting assholes complaining about gays and “trannies” and quoting the Bible and making racist remarks about Africans. Let us pass over those contemptible arguments; there’s no dealing with them rationally. Spit and move on.
But there’s another flavor of argument that annoys me to no end: people who cite science and evolution to support their ignorant misconceptions about human nature. I want to address two, one anti-gay and the other pro-gay, both wrong.
What an awful name for such a graceful animal.
The context of this graph isn’t entirely clear, but it’s from Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra of UC Davis, and it’s from a poll of 800 first year students, so I presume it’s the results of a survey of their incoming class?
Maybe one of the things we need to do as part of popularizing science to the general public is to emphasize the diversity of life, and talk more about the cool things plants and bacteria and fungi and so forth do. I know I started out as a zoologist, am still mostly focused on animal development, but over the years I’ve become increasingly aware that there are amazing contrasts to be studied. We might wish we could study aliens from Mars, but every time I look at plant development, for instance, I feel like I’m examining extraterrestrials already.
Sometimes, people email me with good questions. Here’s one.
When I was a kid, my own visualization of evolution was Lamarckism.
But I didn’t know it. In reading Dawkins and others, I know it doesn’t exist. But it seems this article is claiming it does to some extent. Can you comment? I’m curious as to the current consensus as I’ve been reading a lot about genes that can be turned on and passed to offspring. Can you take a look?
This is a fairly common question. Looked at naively, developmental plasticity seems to be Lamarckian — we’re talking about organisms responding with morphological changes to their environment, just like Lamarck’s example of the giraffe stretching its neck. But that’s only the first step; the transmission of a distribution of traits to the next generation is purely Darwinian.
