I just finished reading the wonderful New Yorker article Darwin’s Surprise by Michael Specter. This is some of the most interesting reading around (at least in my opinion).
I should have been a biologist.
Nothing provides more convincing evidence for the “theory” of evolution than the viruses contained within our DNA. Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short. Endogenous retroviruses provide a trail of molecular bread crumbs leading millions of years into the past.
And that trail appears to lead to the very roots of human existence and possibly to a cure for HIV/AIDS.
Richard Dawkins takes a stab at why we’re here, using science and reason to back up his answer. It’s an interesting and inspiring perspective on an old question.
The following is a clip from Cosmos, where the late Dr. Carl Sagan speaks about 4 billion years of evolution. In the background simple animations morph from one species to another illustrating the point.
I have to ask myself, is it because those pesky scientists have been wrong about so many things or because religion has been so particularly good at teaching us about the way the world is?
The data from several recent Gallup studies suggest that Americans’ religious behavior is highly correlated with beliefs about evolution. Those who attend church frequently are much less likely to believe in evolution than are those who seldom or never attend.
I’d be interested if there is also a correlation between those that finish high school and those that trust the science behind the theory of evolution, and again between those that go on to University and if they believe in so called “intelligent design” or evolution.
The data indicate some seeming confusion on the part of Americans on this issue. About a quarter of Americans say they believe both in evolution’s explanation that humans evolved over millions of years and in the creationist explanation that humans were created as is about 10,000 years ago.
Quite frankly, no matter which side of the debate you take, you have to admit the data indicate about a quarter of Americans are stupid.
This is about ten years old, but I just discovered it recently and think it applies pretty much perfectly to a conversation I had only a week ago. Yes, as hard as it is to believe, there are still people who refuse to accept evolution as “science”.
When I was enrolled in University, one of the classes I wanted to take was Philosophy of Game Theory. Unfortunately, disillusioned by my lack of interest after taking the introductory class (a prerequisite) I decided that Philosophy wasn’t for me after all.
Game Theory (Wikipedia) however, is still a very fascinating topic. Couple that with an interest in biology, sociology, and economics and the short documentary, “Nice Guys Finish First“, by Richard Dawkins becomes a tremendously interesting look at how selfish and altruistic behavior can be the greatest benefit or harm to the individual—and consequently also to the group.
Within any collaborative effort, participants do their part giving so that there might be some kind of benefit reaped out of the collective work of the project. Derek Powazek proposes that perhaps the participants need not even be aware of their contributions in order for a system to form benefitting the perverbial greater good. Read about it in his post, Design for Selfishness.
As I read it, I started to think that as powerful search engines like Google and Yahoo continue to pull the web into one easily accessible medium, a dissection at different levels of the internet can be very revealing. For example, on any given community driven web page the creator may have big plans for the users input of finely crafted content but may or may not be actually offering anything for it. As Powazek points out there has to be a reason for the user to contribute, “If you’re making a product that’s asking users to do something—anything—that is going to add value to your company, ask yourself why anyone would bother.” There are plenty of not so good reasons that get passed off all the time: “Because it’s cool!”, “Because they contribute to Wikipedia/Slashdot/Whatever, and we’re just like that!”, or “Because we enable them to use their voice.”
But he goes on to explain that there are some good answers too:
Because we solve a problem they have. Because we give them something they can’t get anywhere else. Because we enable a kind of communication that’s unlike anything else. Because we make their lives more convenient. Because we give them, or save them, money. Because we enable them to do more with less. Because they told us they wanted to.
The whole scenario reminds me of the concept presented in Richard Dawkins famous book, “The Selfish Gene”. The book’s thesis is that in any living creature the genes that get passed on are the ones whose mutations serve their own implicit interests, not necessarily those of the organism, much less any larger level.
Let me use tagging photos as an example (I know this is the same one Powazek used, but it’s the best one). Within Flickr.com users have the ability to put tags on their photos. This helps them to find their own photos quickly and easily when they search by tag, but it also benefits the flickr community at large because they are able to search everyone’s photos by their tags.
The same is true within the context of the blogosphere as a whole. Here individuals write about specific topics and whatever their motivation the result is we are provided with a vast expanse of searchable content.
Thinking about all the posts and topics I’ve written about, I hope you, the good readers of this site, find something useful here.
Using supercomputers to respond to a potential American health emergency, scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle have developed a simulation model that makes stark predictions about the possible future course of an avian influenza pandemic.
Based on today’s environment of world-wide connectivity, beginning with 10 infected people arriving in Los Angelos, the simulation predicts that the pandemic will spread quickly throughout the continental United States, peaking about 90 days after the initial introduction.
The computer simulation models a synthetic population that matches U.S. census demographics and worker mobility data by randomly assigning the simulated individuals to households, workplaces, schools, and the like. Department of Transportation travel data is used to model long-distance trips during the course of the simulation, realistically capturing the spread of the pandemic virus by airplane and other passenger travel across the United States.
“In the highly mobile U.S. population, travel restrictions alone will not be enough to stop the spread; a mixture of many mitigation strategies is more likely to be effective than a few strictly enforced ones,” said Kadau, also of Los Alamos’ Theoretical Division.
The number of symptomatic cases at any point in time is shown on a logarithmic color scale, with 1 or fewer cases per 1000 in green, 50 per 1000 in yellow, and 100 or more per 1000 in red.
Darwinist’s rejoice and creationists look the other way after the discovery of “a prehistoric critter that represents a missing link in the evolutionary chain”. Paleontologists from the University of Chicago and several other institutions dug the fossils out of rock formations discovered on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic.
Fishapod dates from about 383 million years ago. It had the scales, teeth and gills of a fish, but also a big, curved rib cage that suggests the creature had lungs as well. The ribs interlock, moreover, unlike a fish’s, implying they were able to bear fishapod’s weight—an unnecessary trait in a fish. It had a neck—most unfishlike. And, most surprising of all, its pectoral fins included bones that look like nothing less than a primitive wrist and fingers.
Apparently it caused quite the stir. His response:
Wow. A lot of people read my blog entry on Intelligent Design and interpreted it to mean I believe it. I guess the part where I say I don’t believe it wasn’t sufficiently clear.
I got into a conversation about evolution last night with an active member of the Mormon Church. I presented the concept that though other religions seem to think evolution is the tool of the devil, LDS folks shouldn’t think so. This afternoon I discovered a great article by Michael R. Ash, The Mormon Myth of Evil Evolution, which shows that the official Church position on evolution is neutral.
Even if you’re not from a Mormon background, you may find it interesting how a major world religion has avoided committing itself one way or the other to such an obviously important topic. Also I don’t think one has to be a Mormon in order to try and reconsile one’s beliefs with science; perhaps there is something every religious person could learn from the article.
The 1918 flu virus, that caused the Spanish Flu Pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza Pandemic, has been recently resurrected by scientists in an effort to understand how the virus works, and to potentially prevent a similar outbreak.
It was the culmination of work that began a decade ago and involved fishing tiny fragments of the 1918 virus from snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died in the 1918 pandemic. The soldiers’ tissue had been saved in an Army pathology warehouse, and the woman had been buried in permanently frozen ground.
I discovered another pummelling essay destroying Intelligent Design. This one is good because it not only lays out the “evolution” of the Intelligent Design camp, but also explains the science behind evolution in a way that any astute reader would be able to understand.
It’s nice and thorough with about six long but fascinating pages—so set aside some time if you’re going to read it.
“When scientists announced they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome.”
The chimpanzee genetic information let scientists put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests and the predictions made under the theory passed.
Today a Federal judge in Harrisburg, Pa. USA, will begin to hear a case that asks whether Intelligent Design or other non-scientific explanations should be compulsory teaching material in a biology class.
But the plaintiffs, who are parents opposed to teaching ID as science, will do more than merely argue that those alternatives are weaker than the theory of evolution.
They will make the case — plain to most scientists but poorly understood by many others — that these alternatives are not scientific theories at all.
