Punctuated Equilibrium in a new (sorta) book

If you have a subscription to New Scientist, you can read my review of Stephen Jay Gould’s latest book. “He’s dead!” you might say, but he does have a new book on the way, titled Punctuated Equilibrium(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).

Actually, it’s not new — it’s simply chapter 9 of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) extracted and published as a stand-alone book. It tells you something about Structure that this actually works well!

If you don’t subscribe to New Scientist, the gist of the review is that it’s an excellent book, it’s actually much more digestible on its own, and that if you want a solid, meaty summary of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, this is it. It’s not a light book, though—there’s both a great amount of supporting data presented, and some weighty considerations of the implications of the theory.

Mitt Romney, theistic evolutionist…and this is supposed to be a good thing?

What is going on here? I read Mitt Romney’s comments on evolution on TPM Cafe and was surprised at how many people think it was a positive development.

Is this a first? Mitt Romney isn’t pandering to religious right voters or flip-flopping on an issue important to them in this interview, in which he reveals that he opposes the teaching of intelligent design:

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

While governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney opposed the teaching of intelligent design in science classes.

“In my opinion, the science class is where to teach evolution, or if there are other scientific thoughts that need to be discussed,” he said. “If we’re going to talk about more philosophical matters, like why it was created, and was there an intelligent designer behind it, that’s for the religion class or philosophy class or social studies class.”

How about that?

Read the comments over there. People are calling it “startling”, “intelligent”, and that it’s brave of him to accept a basic tenet of biology. What the hell are they talking about?

[Read more…]

A new creationist argument

It’s always so exciting to see a new creationist argument…until you actually look at it and see how silly it is. And they’ve been getting more and more desperately absurd as the years go by and the flaws in the old arguments get harder and harder to support. Once upon a time, they could just say it rained really hard for 40 days to flood the earth. When it was pointed out that you can’t wring that much water out of the atmosphere, they had to contrive all kinds of elaborate conditions for earth prior to the flood, with deep reservoirs and a “vapor canopy” of crystalline hydrogen to keep huge volumes of water under pressure above the earth. That was awfully silly, so now this new argument tries to rescue it with “evidence” for some mighty weird conditions on God’s earth.

[Read more…]

Technical difficulties!

The server here is not working well—people are getting lots of “Internal Server Errors” when they try to post comments, and I’m seeing the same problem when I try to post articles. Despite the error message, though, the comments are usually going through. IGNORE THE ERRORS.

Here’s the usual run of affairs. You type in a witty and insightful comment as you always do, and then click “Post”. Usually, this goes smoothly, the comment gets sent, the server tucks it into its database, and the page is refreshed to show your sweet, beautiful words in the thread.

Lately, something is balking after the server stores your comment, and it’s showing you an error page instead of your sweet, beautiful words. Now here’s the problem, and this is important. Do not ever do this: click the “back” button in your browser, and then click on “Post” again to resend it. Your comment is already there, and you’re just piling up more copies of the same comment.

Here’s what you should do if you get the error. Click the “back” button. Select your comment from the text box, and select “copy” from the edit menu. Then click on the “refresh” or “reload” button in your browser, and see if your comment was actually stored. If it was, you’re done. If it wasn’t, then you should paste your words back into the text box, and then click on “Post” again.

Remember, the error messages may be lying to you. Don’t trust them. Verify.

If you’ve made umpty-eleven submissions of the same comment, don’t ask me to delete them for you, either. When I go in to the control panel to tinker, I get those error messages on just about every operation. It’s driving me a bit nuts, so please don’t add to it.

Physics of the Sandman

James Kakalios gets to use the latest Spider-Man movie as an excuse to explain the physics of granular materials in the New York Times. Good thing they didn’t ask a biologist about Sandman … all I could think about was that there was no way a loose aggregate of coarse sand would be able to mimic the function of the human brain, which is built upon the sub-micron-scale specific organization of diverse molecules. I would be such a wet blanket.

No, wait, I did think of another thing: could you incapacitate Sandman by dumping your cat’s litterbox on him? I’d think he’d go running off to do some emergency particle segregation right away.

I will say that the Sandman special effects were the best part of the movie. The rest — plot, acting, dialogue — eh, not so much.

Carnivalia, and an open thread

Here’s a slew of good stuff to entertain you on a pleasant Friday, the last day of finals week here at UMM. I have to give my genetics students their final exam in a short while—I fear they are not having a happy time right now. When they’re done, though, the sun will be shining, commencement awaits tomorrow … and I will be sitting in gloomy room somewhere, red pen in hand, grading.

A good start

Rupert Murdoch has openly admitted that global warming is a real problem.

At an event held this morning in midtown Manhattan and webcast to all News Corp. employees, Murdoch launched a company-wide plan to address climate change that includes not only a pledge to reduce the company’s emissions (which has come to be expected at such biz-greening events) but also a vow to weave climate messaging into the content and programming of News Corp.’s many holdings.

Ironically, though, Murdoch still employs that ignorant junk science guy, Steve Milloy, as a Fox News columnist. Here’s a suggestion to Murdoch for a good start: stop disseminating lies about science, and fire Steve Milloy. Sign the petition and give Rupert Murdoch a hint.