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AIBS Publishes Darwin Articles Open Access
 
To celebrate the 150th anniversary this month of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is publishing open access two peer-reviewed articles about Charles Darwin and his historic insights into evolution.

The two articles are by Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley, and James T. Costa of Western Carolina University.  Padian's article, "Ten Myths About Charles Darwin," appeared in the October issue of the AIBS journal BioScience and can be read at http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/full/10.1525/bio.2009.59.9.10.  Costa's article, "The Darwinian Revelation: Tracing the Origin and Evolution of an Idea" is published in the November issue of BioScience and can be read at http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/full/10.1525/bio.2009.59.10.10.  Padian explores some common inaccuracies and untruths about Darwin and his life's work, painting in the process a clear portrait of the man and his struggles to develop a theory to explain the diversity of nature.  Costa draws on Darwin's letters and notebooks and other sources to trace the origins of Darwin's key insights, which came to him over many years. Costa suggests that biology teachers can use Darwin's reasoning as a superb example of creative scientific thinking.

From a recent e-mail:

Live, Free Webcast of "Evolution in Extreme Environments" Symposium

Those who cannot attend this year's National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) conference in Denver will nonetheless be able to participate in the fifth annual evolution symposium, cosponsored by AIBS and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. Educators and students are encouraged to tune in to the live Webcast on Friday, 13 November, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Mountain Standard Time, and to take advantage of this opportunity to hear internationally renowned researchers discuss their fascinating, cutting-edge work in "extreme" evolutionary biology. Speakers will talk about how life evolves, adapts, and flourishes in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, such as high-altitude areas, the deep-sea, Arctic ice, and caves. Classrooms around the world will be able to submit questions online and speakers will respond in real time. For full program information, including speaker names, talk titles and times, and the link to view the live Webcast, please visit www.nescent.org/NABT09Webcast.php or send an e-mail to eog@nescent.org.

The PBS documentary series, NOVA, has produced many, many useful programs on evolution and the history of life. Now many of those resources are collected into a single, comprehensive web site, NOVA evolution. The site provides a variety of resources for students, teachers, and everyone who's interested in learning more. It looks like a tremendously valuable resource, and they asked Carl Zimmer to come up with his list of the ten biggest developments in evolutionary biology over the last dedade. Check it out.

Birds are noteworthy not only for their wit, charm, and sartorial splendor but also for their great dancing. So, for its contribution to this year's Darwin celebrations, London's Rambert Dance Company is putting on a bird-inspired show.(from Origins)

And I'm not talking Ringling Brothers. No. Richard Dawkins' new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, is being released on 22 September. But you don't have to wait until then to read it. The Times (that's the London Times, not the New York Times) is serializing it.

You read about it at Science Central about it, or you can head straight to the Times and start reading it right now. He starts by describing the plight that biology teachers all too frequently face:

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context -- which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word "evolution" systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into "change over time".

Head over and take a look. Dawkins can be infuriating, but he is (almost) always worth reading.

Proponents of intelligent design creationism are always talking about the "miraculous" ways in which the world fits together -- the vertebrate eye, the blood clotting cascade and so on. They claim that if even one piece is missing, the whole shebang will stop working. They've been repeatedly shown to be wrong. The whole idea of irreducible complexity is going nowhere.

There's another problem with intelligent design. A lot of things in the world don't look so intelligently designed. Would an intelligent designer have us ingest food and water and transport it to the stomach through a tube that's shared with the tube taking oxygen to our lungs? A designer who would build us so that the Heimlich maneuver had to be invented seems pretty stupid to me.

Here's another example from today's issue of Science.

It's long been known that many animals acquire protective chemicals from symbionts that live with or within them. The aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum, for example, gains protection against a parasitoid wasp when it's "infected" by a bacterium, Hamiltonella defensa. Now it may seem a little odd that an intelligent designer would leave A. pisum unprotected without the bacterium, but maybe the bacterium is really common and it was "easier" that way.¹

But it doesn't stop there.


Kerry Oliver and colleagues show that being infected by Hamiltonella alone isn't enough for A. pisum to be protected. The Hamiltonella has to be infected by a virus in order to confer protection on A. pisum.

The light gray bar on the left side of the figure shows the fraction of A. pisum individuals parasitized when they are uninfected. The dark gray bar on the right side of the figure shows the fraction of individuals parasitized when they are infected with Hamiltonella, but the Hamiltonella aren't infected with the virus. No difference. It's only when individuals are infected with Hamiltonella that is itself infected with the virus that they are protected against parasitism (black bar in the middle).²

That strikes me as a system that might have been designed by Rube Goldberg, not an intelligent designer.³