Check out Chris Mooney’s post on the latest move in Washington to gut government science, which cloaks itself in bogus terms like “sound science.” This dreadful campaign probably won’t get much attention in the national media, but its effects–on conservation, climate change policy, and so on–could be profoundly bad.
Charles Darwin had no great hope of witnessing natural selection at work in his own time. He assumed that it would operate as slowly and imperceptibly as the water that eroded cliffs and canyons. He would have been delighted to discover that he was actually wrong on this count. By the mid-1900s, scientists were running selection experiments in laboratories and beginning to document the effects of natural selection in the wild, such as the rise of insects that were resistant to pesticides. Still, the work has been slow and painstaking. Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton have done some of the best work on natural selection in the wild, documenting its effect on Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos island. (Changes in climate lead to changes in the food supply which in turn changes in the beaks.) The Grants have dedicated 30 years of research to the evolutionary fate of this small group of birds. The slowdown comes in part from the months or years that animals need to reproduce, generating the new mutations and rearrangements of DNA that natural selection needs in order to operate. So what would serve as a better case study?
If you’re in New York, you’ve got two chances on Tuesday January 27 to hear me talk about Soul Made Flesh. At 5:30 I’ll be giving a talk in the “Mind Over Body” lecture series at New York Public Library’s Science and Industry Branch at 188 Madison Ave. I’ll then be heading to the East Villiage to talk in the more intimate setting of KGB (85 E. 4th St.) at 7:30. Both events are free.
Last week I wrote a post about some new research that suggests that global warming could trigger large-scale extinctions in the next few decades. In particular, I dissected some of the objections that were leveled at the study, pointing out how irrelevant they are to the actual science at hand. Some people who posted comments raised a question that I didn’t talk much about: how did biodiversity respond to rapid climate change in the not-so-distant past?
If you’d like an example of the latest rhetorical tricks being used by antievolutionists, you can’t do better than this press release issued today from the Discovery Institute. The Minnesota legistlature has to choose between two drafts of state science standards written by a committee. A minority of the committee wrote the second draft, which requires that “weaknesses” of evolution be taught. The Discovery Institute (a well-funded cryptocreationist outfit) is trying to mess with biology class, as it has in states across the country.