Category: Blog
From his latest column:
Liberals see the political value to teaching evolution in school, as it makes teachers and children think they are no more special than animals. Childhood joy and ambition can turn into depression as children learn to reject that they were created in the image of God.
He may not be in office any more, but this piece wins Kemp an honorary spot in the creationist-friendly political pantheon.
Continue reading “Jack Kemp Phillis Schlafly: Evolution as Evil Plot”
I’m happy to report that the eyes are back.
My third book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, came out in 2001. It’s a survey of the history and cutting edge of evolutionary biology, from the origin of new species to mass extinctions, from the rise of complex life to the emergence of humans. The book explores evolutionary races between hosts and parasites, between males and females. It puts evolution in a historical context as well, showing how Darwin’s theory emerged out of the science of his time and how social and political tensions foster hostility to evolution today. Scientific American called it “as fine a book as one will find on the subject.” (More information, as well as an excerpt, can be found here.)
Like many parasites, a species of bacteria called Wolbachia takes charge of its own fate. Wolbachia can only survive inside the cells of its hosts–invertebrates such as this lovely common eggfly. This way of life limits Wolbachia’s opportunities for long-term survival. If Wolbachia lives inside a female insect, it can infect her eggs. When those eggs hatch and mature into adult insects, they will be infected by Wolbachia as well. But if Wolbachia should find itself in a male, it has reached a dead end. It cannot infect sperm cells, and thus it has no escape from a male host. When a male host dies, Wolbachia dies as well.
Continue reading “Down with the Male-Killers: A Tale of Evolution in Our Time”
The Sunday Times in the UK reported yesterday on an upcoming paper that claims that the ever-fascinating Homo floresiensis (a k a the Hobbit) is not a new species, as previously reported. Instead, it was a human with a genetic defect called microcephaly that gave it a small head.
This is a long-standing criticism, but only a couple papers based on it have been published since the Hobbit fossils were discovered almost two years ago. The article doesn’t have a lot of details. When the new paper comes out (in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) I guess we’ll get more.
I was happy to see that my post on Tuesday about the evolution of whales attracted a lot of readers. One commenter asked about seals and manatees. As other commenters kindly explained, those mammals descend from other ancestors (relatives of bears and elephants, respectively) that independently moved into the water. This transition has occurred many times since vertebrates moved on land. In some cases, the animals have adapted completely to the water (such as marine reptiles). In other cases, the transition has not been so complete. Other relatives of elephants evolved into desmostylians, sometimes called “sea-bears.” They looked like polar bears but fed on aquatic plants. (pdfs here and here) The picture here is of Paleoparadoxia, from Siberia.