Futuyma reviews What Darwin Got Wrong
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/futuyma-reviews-what-darwin-got-wrong/
Crack evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma (from SUNY Stony Brook) assesses Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong in this week’s Science. It would be an understatement to say that the book doesn’t fare too well: the review is called “Two critics without a clue.”
These theories of natural selection work: they successfully predict research outcomes. John Werren predicted and experimentally confirmed that the first of two female parasitic wasps who lay eggs in a host insect lays a more female-biased brood than the second,. . .
(Why Evolution is True, May 6, 2010)
Bill McKibben on Cochabamba, Congress and Eaarth
Twenty years ago, environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, but his warnings went largely unheeded.
Now, as people are grappling with the unavoidable effects of climate change and confronting an earth that’s suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in unprecedented ways, Bill McKibben is out with a new book about what we have to do to survive this brave new world.
(Solve Climate, April 18, 2010)
Super Stemmys, a stem cell story
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57276/
Stem cells to save the day! Or the heart, at least. That’s the plot of a new children’s book on adult (or repair) stem cells, published by theRepair Stem Cell Institute(RSCI) — a Dallas- and Bangkok-based public affairs company that provides interested patients with contact information for stem cell treatment centers around the world.
“It’s a nice idea,” said cell biologist Mahendra Rao ofLife Technologies,a California-based biotechnology company. “I think it’s good to tell kids about all current events, [including] technological breakthroughs,” and “it’s a nice book for kids [with] illustrations [that] are nice and a logical flow to it.”
(The-scientist.com, April 8, 2010)
Supernormal Stimuli
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57144/
The author of a new book on behavioral evolution explains how primal urges overrun their original purpose.
Put a mirror on the side of a beta fighting fish’s aquarium and the gaudy iridescent male will beat himself against the glass, attacking a perceived intruder. A hen lays eggs day after day as a farmer removes them for human breakfasts — 3,000 in a lifetime without one chick hatching, but she never gives up trying. The healthiest, largest male chickadees have the highest crests on their heads and they are sought after as mates. When researchers outfit runt males with little pointed caps, much like the human dunce cap, females line up to mate with them, forsaking the naturally fitter, hatless males.
(TheScientist.com.February 19, 2010)
Misunderstanding Darwin Natural selection’s secular critics get it wrong
http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/block_kitcher.php
What Darwin Got Wrong
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (cloth)
Ned Block and Philip Kitcher
What Darwin Got Wrong
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (cloth)
Ned Block and Philip Kitcher
In On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, Charles Darwin made two remarkable scientific contributions. First, he presented an overwhelming case for the relatedness of all living things. Biological diversity, he argued, results from a process of “transmutation” of species—via “descent with modification.” Second, he recognized that the basic mechanism of such change is natural selection: a combination of variations in traits and a selective retention of the variations that contribute to reproductive success.
Descent with modification was accepted quickly. As early as 1872, Thomas Henry Huxley described Darwin as having achieved a revolution comparable to that brought about by Newton’s Principia. Natural selection, by contrast, remained controversial until the 1930s, when Darwin’s ideas were integrated with the genetics of Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan, creating the “Modern Synthesis.” More than 70 years later, thanks to a proliferation of evolutionary explanations and significant new theoretical contributions, the fundamentals of evolutionary biology are reasonably well settled.
(Boston Review, March/April 2010)
Ruse and Midgley on Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini on natural selection
Jerry Coyne comments on reviews of What Darwin Got Wrong.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/ruse-on-fodor-and-piattelli-palmerini/
What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (not to be confused with Massimo Pigliucci), came out two days ago. Its thesis is that while evolution may be true, natural selection plays at best a minor role in evolutionary transformation. Selection, say F&P-P, can be rejected on two grounds: it is empirically untenable and philosophically unsupportable.
(Why Evolution is True, February 19, 20100
A paleobiologist’s response to Darwin’s Dilemma
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/a-paleobiologists-response-to-darwins-dilemma/
I’ve posted twice (here and here) about the intelligent-design movieDarwin’s Dilemma, a DVD of which was sent to me by participant and young-earth creationist Paul Nelson. When I was in the UK two weeks ago, I gave the DVD to a friend studying paleontology at Oxford University, who in turn showed it to a group of students and faculty.
(Why Evolution is True, February 13, 2010)
Im-Propaganda: How Effective Are Misinformation Campaigns to Manipulate Public Opinion?
ScientificAmerican.com became interested in the idea of misinformation because of the Iranian media reportedly saying that the U.S. and Israel were involved in the assassination of the physicist in Iran. Does this example play into distrust of Iranians in the U.S.?
I think that is really an important issue to look at. In my view, it’s not at all clear yet that those reports [by the Iranian media] are totally absurd. The chances are probably pretty good that it’s absurd, but we have too many examples where our government in the past has been involved in various kinds of undesirable and secretive activities. Over time, if other evidence [that Tehran was involved] becomes available, then the fact that people still might be pushing [the blame onto the U.S. and Israel] becomes very important.
You’ve got to remember that how we view things has less to do with what we might call the objective facts of the case than with context and our experience. For example, after 9/11 a number of opinion polls in, broadly speaking, many Arab communities showed that many citizens on the street actually believed that Israel and even the U.S. were involved in planning and carrying out the 9/11 attacks. They saw it as a way to generate anger and hostility to the Arab world and, in particular, Iraq.
(Scientific American.com, January 18, 2010)
Scientists Need to Get Out More
http://tr.im/F9U5 Two books look at science illiteracy in America and report that it can be reversed if scientists emerge from the lab and start communicating.
(Miller-McCune Newsltter.com, November 17, 2009)