Swiftboating Evolution

From Dr. Tom Schmid (UNCW Department of Philosophy and Religion):

Ben Stein has turned to "swiftboating" evolutionary biology in his newest film, which links Darwin to Nazism, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," <http://www.expelledthemovie.com/> according to this article.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/29/950658.aspx.

Tree of Life Continues to Evolve

Casey Dunn has gathered his share of weird animals. He dredged up sea spiders that live around the docks in Waikiki. He dived to the sea floor to scoop up mud, in search of bizarre, spiny creatures called kinorhynchs that are smaller than a grain of sand. Dunn, a biologist at Brown University, hunts for weird animals to get his hands on their DNA. Hidden in their genes is a record of the history of the entire animal kingdom, some 700 million years of evolutionary change. By analyzing the DNA of dozens of different kinds of animals, he and his colleagues have made some astounding discoveries about animal evolution. For one thing, the common ancestor of all living animals may have been more complicated than once thought. To read more: http://snipurl.com/267m8

Source: "Science in the News," Sigma Xi <http://sitn.sigmaxi.org/> last accessed: April 30, 2008.

Human Evolution: We're Not Finished Yet

"Oh what a piece of work is man," wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, male nipples, impacted wisdom teeth, flatulence and hiccups. One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design - the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life - is that on closer inspection, we look like we've been put together by someone who didn't read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things. Viewed as products of evolution, however, our anatomical quirks start to make sense, says University of Chicago fossil hunter and anatomy professor Neil Shubin, author of the recent book Your Inner Fish (Pantheon Books). And by focusing on our less lofty traits, evolutionary biology can help dispel one of the most egregious and even tragic fallacies surrounding Darwinian evolution - that it moves toward perfection, with man at the apex of some towering ladder. To read more: http://snipurl.com/2571m

Source: Sigma Xi's Science in the News. URL: http://sitn.sigmaxi.org/. Last accessed: April 22, 2008.

NOTE: Randall Library has just ordered a copy of Shubin's book, Your Inner Fish.

Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse

The video below features a lecture by Dr. Barbara Forrest, Professor of Philosophy in the Department of History and Political Science at Southeastern Louisiana University, in which she provides a look at her work in the Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board trial as well as an overview of the history of the intelligent design (ID) movement.

See: http://www.centerforinquiry.net/digitalmedia/video/barbara_forrest_inside_creationisms_trojan_horse/

Randall Library has a copy of the book she authored with Paul R. Gross, Creationism's Trojan Horse: the Wedge of Intelligent Design (http://uncclc.coast.uncwil.edu/record=b1965771~S4).

Darwin's First Draft Goes Online

Darwin's First Draft Goes Online (from BBC News Online)

The first draft of a book which changed the world's attitude to evolution is available for the first time online. Papers which led to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University's library. The draft notes are among 20,000 archive items created by the 19th Century naturalist during his lifetime.

Dr John van Wyhe, a Darwin specialist at Cambridge University, said: "He changed our understanding of nature." The online archive about Charles Darwin is so vast it would take someone two months to view it all if they downloaded one image per minute. To read more: http://snipurl.com/24qdk

Sigma Xi / ELC Lecture: Dr. Frederik Nijhout

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society and the UNCW Evolution Learning Community present:

“The Origin and Development of Polyphenisms in Precis octavia” by Dr. Frederik Nijhout

Where: Dobo Hall 134, UNCW
When: Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 7:00 pm. Reception and poster session begins at 6:00 pm in Dobo Hall Foyer

Fred Nijhout a Professor in the Department of Biology at Duke University. He is broadly interested in developmental physiology and in the interactions between development and evolution. He has several lines of research ongoing in his laboratory that on the surface may look independent from one another, but all share a conceptual interest in understanding how complex traits arise through, and are affected by, the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. (more ... )

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