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[Mgoblue201]

That actually seems less like a way to sell magazines and more like a way to repudiate irresponsible articles such as this one:

National Geographic is pretty level-headed with their titles.

 

[Zaptruder]

That actually seems less like a way to sell magazines and more like a way to repudiate irresponsible articles such as this one:

National Geographic is pretty level-headed with their titles.

That's a pretty awesome piece of art on the cover... shame about the words on it

 

[Shanadeus]

National Geographic you fiend.

 

[Dead Man]

That actually seems less like a way to sell magazines and more like a way to repudiate irresponsible articles such as this one:

http://www.texscience.org/reports/NewScientistDarwinCover.jpg[IMG]

National Geographic is pretty level-headed with their titles.[/QUOTE]
That seems pretty out of place for New Scientist, they are definitely pro science, left leaning, and results oriented.

 

[Yagharek]

Looks like theyve slipped into the gutter. Hopefully momentarily.

 

[Dead Man]

Looks like theyve slipped into the gutter. Hopefully momentarily.

Here is the editorial from that issue:

"THERE is nothing new to be discovered in physics." So said Lord Kelvin in 1900, shortly before the intellectual firestorm ignited by relativity and quantum mechanics proved him comprehensively wrong.

If anyone now thinks that biology is sorted, they are going to be proved wrong too. The more that genomics, bioinformatics and many other newer disciplines reveal about life, the more obvious it becomes that our present understanding is not up to the job. We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism.

A particularly pertinent example is provided in this week's cover story - the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since (see "Axing Darwin's tree"). Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable. Other important bits of biology - notably development, ageing and sex - are similarly turning out to be much more involved than we ever imagined. As evolutionary biologist Michael Rose at the University of California, Irvine, told us: "The complexity of biology is comparable to quantum mechanics."

Biology has been here before. Although Darwin himself, with the help of Alfred Russel Wallace, triggered a revolution in the mid-1800s, there was a second revolution in the 1930s and 1940s when Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright and others incorporated Mendelian genetics and placed evolution on a firm mathematical foundation.

As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that "New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong". Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not.

Nor will the new work do anything to diminish the standing of Darwin himself. When it came to gravitation and the laws of motion, Isaac Newton didn't see the whole picture either, but he remains one of science's giants. In the same way, Darwin's ideas will prove influential for decades to come.

So here's to the impending revolution in biology. Come Darwin's 300th anniversary there will be even more to celebrate.

I won't copy the actual article since it is behind the subscriber wall, but I think the editorial explains it well enough.

 

[Monocle]

That editorial doesn't make up for the irresponsible and sensationalistic cover.

 

[Dead Man]

That editorial doesn't make up for the irresponsible and sensationalistic cover.

I think from a non US perspective it is fine. Sometimes people don't realise how much the creationists seize on things like this if they are not there.

 

[Yagharek]

Ive got that issue at home. It annoyed me greatly because the cover was sensationalist "click bait" and the editorial basically said "scientific theories change when more information is uncovered".

Well, what a a revelation that was.

I take issue with the way they applied sensationalist reporting tactics to a subject that is already and relentlessly under assault from uninformed (and wilfully ignorant) corners.

Darwin was "wrong" because he didnt know about DNA, "wrong" because he didnt have radiometric dating to back up his extant specimens with fossils of conceivable ancestors, "wrong" because he didn't show speciation occurring in real time.

But he was right about the fact there is underlying evolutionary processes, and a needlessly sensationalist headline like that detracts from it.

It's the worst kind of science reporting.

 

[mckmas8808]

Ive got that issue at home. It annoyed me greatly because the cover was sensationalist "click bait" and the editorial basically said "scientific theories change when more information is uncovered".

Well, what a a revelation that was.

I take issue with the way they applied sensationalist reporting tactics to a subject that is already and relentlessly under assault from uninformed (and wilfully ignorant) corners.

Darwin was "wrong" because he didnt know about DNA, "wrong" because he didnt have radiometric dating to back up his extant specimens with fossils of conceivable ancestors, "wrong" because he didn't show speciation occurring in real time.

But he was right about the fact there is underlying evolutionary processes, and a needlessly sensationalist headline like that detracts from it.

It's the worst kind of science reporting.

I agree with you man. This kind of cover and reporting makes it seem as if Darwin just wasn't up to the task of proving evolution true. I don't know it just seems weird. I appreciate the editorial, but I wouldn't have to if they didn't use that terrible cover.

 

[Mgoblue201]

That seems pretty out of place for New Scientist, they are definitely pro science, left leaning, and results oriented.

The New Scientist article only assaults Darwin's idea of the tree of life. Of course, that doesn't make them any less irresponsible and completely wrong. The tree of life, with several notable exceptions, is still a largely correct metaphor for the evolution of species. Even if they were right, the title is just too broad to be useful.

Ive got that issue at home. It annoyed me greatly because the cover was sensationalist "click bait" and the editorial basically said "scientific theories change when more information is uncovered".

Well, what a a revelation that was.

I take issue with the way they applied sensationalist reporting tactics to a subject that is already and relentlessly under assault from uninformed (and wilfully ignorant) corners.

Darwin was "wrong" because he didnt know about DNA, "wrong" because he didnt have radiometric dating to back up his extant specimens with fossils of conceivable ancestors, "wrong" because he didn't show speciation occurring in real time.

But he was right about the fact there is underlying evolutionary processes, and a needlessly sensationalist headline like that detracts from it.

It's the worst kind of science reporting.

I think that it's pertinent to ask the question when there are still serious attempts (What Darwin Got Wrong, for example) to assail the mechanism of natural selection. And, unlike the New Scientist cover, which attempts to make a blatant factual statement, it's almost impossible to imagine that the National Geographic issue could offer haven for any blinkered creationists who will make a willful attempt to misunderstand science.

I do take issue, however, with this obsession of Darwin. No other field of science - not even Einstein's and Newton's work on gravity - is so reliant upon one man. "Darwinism" has even become a meaningless catch-all phrase for evolution. I suppose it's unprecedented for so many ideas - natural selection, homology, the tree of life - to stand largely intact for so long without having to be seriously rewritten, but there is no reason to mythologize him. Who cares if he was wrong? (And he was, about many things)

 

[DragonGirl]

The New Scientist article only assaults Darwin's idea of the tree of life. Of course, that doesn't make them any less irresponsible and completely wrong. The tree of life, with several notable exceptions, is still a largely correct metaphor for the evolution of species. Even if they were right, the title is just too broad to be useful.

I think that it's pertinent to ask the question when there are still serious attempts (What Darwin Got Wrong, for example) to assail the mechanism of natural selection. And, unlike the New Scientist cover, which attempts to make a blatant factual statement, it's almost impossible to imagine that the National Geographic issue could offer haven for any blinkered creationists who will make a willful attempt to misunderstand science.

I do take issue, however, with this obsession of Darwin. No other field of science - not even Einstein's and Newton's work on gravity - is so reliant upon one man. "Darwinism" has even become a meaningless catch-all phrase for evolution. I suppose it's unprecedented for so many ideas - natural selection, homology, the tree of life - to stand largely intact for so long without having to be seriously rewritten, but there is no reason to mythologize him. Who cares if he was wrong? (And he was, about many things)

I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem to me that the scientific community fixates on him. He's a target of villainy for certain noisy religious sectors and it's this contentious aspect that then drives his presence in popular science media. Conflict sells.

 

[Shanadeus]

I must once again commend you for making such a great thread, Kinitari.

I read some time ago that someone planned to make a general "Sceptic thread", anyone know if that ever got made?

 

[jaxword]

I must once again commend you for making such a great thread, Kinitari.

I read some time ago that someone planned to make a general "Sceptic thread", anyone know if that ever got made?

I think that's been made a few times and it's always trolled to death by religious crowd.

 

[Mgoblue201]

I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem to me that the scientific community fixates on him. He's a target of villainy for certain noisy religious sectors and it's this contentious aspect that then drives his presence in popular science media. Conflict sells.

The scientific community isn't completely immune here - for example, "neo-Darwinism" is a more colloquial term for the modern synthesis or any contemporary version of the evolutionary theory - but yes, I was mostly referring to the frequent invocation of Darwin by any number of creationists, journalists, and laymen. The false equivalency between "Darwinism" and evolution as a whole seems careless and thoughtless. The creationists in particular love to use it as a smear.

 

[Boss Doggie]

I think that's been made a few times and it's always trolled to death by religious crowd.

There is a religious crowd?

Also, people still believe that Darwin did the "survival of the fittest" even though he didn't?

 

[noah111]

Darwin may actually have been wrong, or at least not totally right. I think epigenetics are making people look back into Larmack's theories, epigenetics is a fucking fascinating field atm.

 

[Mgoblue201]

At the moment epigenetics has to be treated with skepticism. Most of the changes never subsist beyond several generations. (Admittedly, my opinions are heavily indebted to Jerry Coyne, which you can read about here and here)

 

[Angry Fork]

This doesn't have to do with evolution directly but I figure this topic is one where people might have more of a solid answer on this. National Geographic does their genome test thing where you can trace your ancient ancestors to other parts of the globe and I'm really interested in doing this.

Anyway you can choose either paternal or maternal testing. I can't afford both right now so I'm just wondering if there's any significant difference and whether one is better than the other or offers better results and so on. Or is it just a matter of which ancestors you'd prefer to know more about?

 

[Lucky Forward]

This doesn't have to do with evolution directly but I figure this topic is one where people might have more of a solid answer on this. National Geographic does their genome test thing where you can trace your ancient ancestors to other parts of the globe and I'm really interested in doing this.

Anyway you can choose either paternal or maternal testing. I can't afford both right now so I'm just wondering if there's any significant difference and whether one is better than the other or offers better results and so on. Or is it just a matter of which ancestors you'd prefer to know more about?

I've been interested in this too, but I haven't done it yet. I think it's just a question of whether you want to trace your paternal or maternal lineage, as far as where they came from in the world and what groups of people they descended from.

 

[Mgoblue201]

From what I remember, the paternal test will look at your Y chromosome (the one inherited from your father). The maternal test will look at the DNA in the mitochondria of your cells, which, for some reason, is only inherited from the mother. Both are reliable, but they will render subtle differences in your path of ancestry (in much more detail than the picture shown):

However, I don't know if one is "better" than the other. You might want to ask the organization administering the test. It probably just comes down to personal preference.

 

[Ghost_Protocol]

Evolution experts:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if after human beings split from Africa and settled in different parts of the world, where the different races began to emerge; if those races stayed isolated millions of years, is it possible (or inevitable) that each race could have developed into an entirely new species?

Is racial diversity evidence of the earliest first steps of speciation, given millions of years and isolation?

 

[rdrr gnr]

Evolution experts:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if after human beings split from Africa and settled in different parts of the world, where the different races began to emerge; if those races stayed isolated millions of years, is it possible (or inevitable) that each race could have developed into an entirely new species?

Is racial diversity evidence of the earliest first steps of speciation, given millions of years and isolation?

Allopatric speciation as applied to humans? I guess it's possible, but I'm not an expert.

 

[Earthstrike]

Evolution experts:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if after human beings split from Africa and settled in different parts of the world, where the different races began to emerge; if those races stayed isolated millions of years, is it possible (or inevitable) that each race could have developed into an entirely new species?

Is racial diversity evidence of the earliest first steps of speciation, given millions of years and isolation?

Given millions of years of isolation, yes, speciation would be quite possible and probably happen. Speciation is merely the accumulation of enough genetic differences that reproduction is no longer possible.

Also, the genetic differences between human "races" did not occur over millions of years, they were on a much shorter timescale, and I put races in quotations because they are not a particularly meaningful genetic classification. It makes about as much sense to classify animals on the colour of their skin as it does humans. More meaningful genetic distinctions exist and they are present among sets of humans with the same colour of skin.

 

[noah111]

Don't human skulls barry greatly depending on race? So someone could basically tell by looking at a skull whether or not someone was x or y, as well as male or female, correct?

Pretty crazy to think skulls vary to such a degree.

 

[rdrr gnr]

If this was already posted, I apologize.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjYjnjvnhb0&feature=channel_video_title

Basic overview of Evolution

Spoiler

vs Creationism.

 

[Mgoblue201]

A recent paper published in Science comes up with a new phylogeny for mammals:

The study used 26 genes to estimate various clades and divergence times. The blue nodes denote divergences that are less well-supported. Jerry Coyne makes several important points on his blog:

- As Christofer M. Helgen points out in a Perspectives piece in the same issue, families prove to be good monophyletic groups: clades like bears, cats, and dogs all indeed fall into families determined earlier on morphological grounds.

- No surprises for major groupings: monotremes (platypus and echidna) are the most distant relatives of living mammals, equally distantly related to the marsupials (as expected, a monophyletic clade) and the placentals.

- The red panda (Ailuridae) is more closely related to procyonids and mustelids (e.g., skunks and raccoons) than to the giant panda, which is in the family Ursidae (bears; the panda’s status as a bear has been known for forty years). This is probably not a surprise to anyone who knows mammals, but I haven’t kept up with mammalian systematics.

- There are tons of bat families, and they’re well diverged from everything else. Their closest relatives appear to be the families that include whales, rhinos, hippos, giraffes, cats, and pangolins, and not the rodents, which are far more distantly related.

- All marine mammals are a monophyletic group, meaning that they shared a single common ancestor, and the closest relative of those whales, dolphins, and porpoises are the hippos.

- The closest relatives of monkeys and apes (and us) comprise the other primates: the lemurs. No surprise there, but the next most closely related group comprises the Dermoptera (the “flying lemurs” which, as noted below, ain’t lemurs) and, after that, the rodents.

- Sloths, armadillos and anteaters group together in a clade that is distantly related to most other mammals, but a bit more closely related to aardvarks, tenrecs, dugongs, and elephants. And all of these groups diverged from other mammalian families a long time ago—on the order of 100 million years.

- Finally, for connoisseurs of paleobiology, the the origin of new orders (a taxonomic level higher than families; orders comprise what most of us think of as “types” of mammals: carnivores, bats, primates, rodents, and so on) occurred after the “KPg” (Cretaceous-Paleogene; formerly called the Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction event about 65 million years ago. This extinction wiped out the dinosaurs, of course, but also many marine invertebrates and terrestrial plants. The authors posit that this extinction event played an important role “in the early diversification and adaptive radiation of mammals,” perhaps by opening up the “ecospace available for mammals.” That’s not a new theory: we’ve all heard, for example, that the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to diversify, but it’s good to see the dates of diversification confirmed in this way.

 

[Mario]

This tree of life infographic popped up in my Facebook feed today.

http://evogeneao.com/tree.html

Maybe a useful resource to add to the OP?

 

[waypoetic]

Theory? THEORY??

smh

 

[Mario]

Theory? THEORY??

Yes, theory.

 

[Kinitari]

Oh man, I remember this thread. Good times. Feels like everyone gets evolution now

 

[Mario]

Feels like everyone gets evolution now

I wish.

 

[Trent Strong]

After all this time, dog breeders don't seem to have been able to change the behavior of dogs much. Some breeds are more chill and more or less aggressive than others, but there seem to be certain essential characteristics of 'dogness', especially when it comes to behavior, that are so hard wired as to be almost unchangeable. Of course, these Platonic essentials can't exist, all dog behaviors must be changeable given enough time and selective pressure... but goddamn, sometimes it seems impossible that these basic dogness behaviors could ever be bred out.

 

[hateradio]

Trent Strong, what are you doing?

 

[Log4Girlz]

Science is evil and promotes necromancy.

 

[Dead Man]

Welp. That was a ride.

 

[Log4Girlz]

Welp. That was a ride.

I see the humor of your post just after mine.

 

[Necromanti]

After all this time, dog breeders don't seem to have been able to change the behavior of dogs much. Some breeds are more chill and more or less aggressive than others, but there seem to be certain essential characteristics of 'dogness', especially when it comes to behavior, that are so hard wired as to be almost unchangeable. Of course, these Platonic essentials can't exist, all dog behaviors must be changeable given enough time and selective pressure... but goddamn, sometimes it seems impossible that these basic dogness behaviors could ever be bred out.

Disregarding artificial selection and everything else for a second, I don't think you're appreciating the sheer time scale that natural selection, for one, had at its disposal to work with to accumulate these changes. Dogs were artificially bred for thousands of years, but we're talking about millions and billions of years for evolution to occur. It's hard to fully wrap our brains around just how long that is in human terms.

 

[Mario]

After all this time, dog breeders don't seem to have been able to change the behavior of dogs much. Some breeds are more chill and more or less aggressive than others, but there seem to be certain essential characteristics of 'dogness', especially when it comes to behavior, that are so hard wired as to be almost unchangeable. Of course, these Platonic essentials can't exist, all dog behaviors must be changeable given enough time and selective pressure... but goddamn, sometimes it seems impossible that these basic dogness behaviors could ever be bred out.

Do dog breeders actually breed for behaviour and demeanour though? Are they actively trying to breed out "dogness"?

I assume, possibly very wrongly, that for the most part breeders are concerned more about physical traits and aesthetics?

 

[Trent Strong]

Trent Strong, what are you doing?

Since this is a sort of the "official" evolution topic, it seemed OK to bump it.

Disregarding artificial selection and everything else for a second, I don't think you're appreciating the sheer time scale that natural selection, for one, had at its disposal to work with to accumulate these changes. Dogs were artificially bred for thousands of years, but we're talking about millions and billions of years for evolution to occur. It's hard to fully wrap our brains around just how long that is in human terms.

I agree with this for the most part, but most life forms, beyond simple stuff like bacteria, didn't take billions of years to evolve, but only millions, since evolution really only took off about 500 million years ago after the Cambrian explosion.

 

[Trent Strong]

Do dog breeders actually breed for behaviour and demeanour though? Are they actively trying to breed out "dogness"?

I assume, possibly very wrongly, that for the most part breeders are concerned more about physical traits and aesthetics?

You could be right. It seems like breeders would want to make a really gentle and quiet breed though. I have yet to meet a dog that doesn't bark it's ass off. (Without training.)

 

[Spinluck]

While we're on it. Why the fuck do we have wisdom teeth?

This shit hurts.

 

[Megalosaro]

Whenever creationists argue for inteloigent design, wisdom teeth are my go to example of how crappy human design actually is.

That and how crappy and prone to defect eyes are.

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

Thread is so old, carbon-14 is accurate enough to date it.

 

[Necromanti]

I agree with this for the most part, but most life forms, beyond simple stuff like bacteria, didn't take billions of years to evolve, but only millions, since evolution really only took off about 500 million years ago after the Cambrian explosion.

Well, sure, but I was indeed starting from ~4 bya, and 500 million years ago is still half a billion years!

But yeah, the numbers are so large that the weight of it is probably disregarded by most people in the absence of an effective analogy. I'm sure that's partly why some people are fine with believing in "microevolution", but not with the implications that arise from extending it over a longer period of time.