- Why it’s time to lay the selfish gene to rest – David Dobbs – Aeon – This raises a question: if merely reading a genome differently can change organisms so wildly, why bother rewriting the genome to evolve? How vital, really, are actual changes in the genetic code? Do we always need DNA changes to adapt to new environments? Are there other ways to get the job done? Is the importance of the gene as the driver of evolution being overplayed?
- Water and air are all you need to make one of world’s most important chemicals | Ars Technica – Licht's method claims to use only two-thirds of the energy of the Haber-Bosch process. Along with the elimination of the need to produce hydrogen from natural gas, the overall carbon emissions are reduced quite significantly. The whole process also takes place at milder conditions (Haber-Bosch needs 450°C and 200-times atmospheric pressure).
- The Canadian Priest Kangaroo –
- Every Day Is Like Wednesday: Re: That movie that’s probably well on its way to making tens of millions of dollars already – And, if a lot of people make a lot of money and there are a lot of accolades being thrown about, then a lot of credit is going to go to a lot of people, from whoever cut those winning trailers to the designers and animators who got Rocket's fur to look just so to Gunn himself. If comic book people get any credit, chances are it's going to be as a collective (i.e. "Marvel") or under a "Special Thanks" near the end of the end-credit scrawl (IMDb has comics writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lannning receiving writing credit; if that's on the screen near the "written by" credit, then that's awesome).
- ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Character Creators Fight for Cash and Credit – NYTimes.com – As Michael explained in a telephone interview, the focus on his brother has encouraged the studio to reconsider its obligations to him. “The more often Bill’s name gets mentioned, and the more often he is given public credit for something that he did, the easier it is for me to go to Marvel and say, ‘You might want to consider raising your offer.’ ”
Articles with the Tag evolution
Terug Naar Je Maker!
You may have noticed that this is Charles Darwin’s 200th birth year. So did the local creationists here in the Netherlands, especially one Kees van Helden. Kees is a professional Christian, who had been in the news before for protesting against supposedly blasphemous advertisements put out by Dixons in 2007 and who has his own lobby organisation, Bijbel en Onderwijs (Bible and Education), mainly known for agitating against Harry Potter, “the modern face of witchcraft”. This Kees van Helden thought it would be a neat idea to use the Darwin anniversary celebrations by publishing his own anti-Darwin leaflet and delivering it to each household in the Netherlands. Saving souls through direct mailing, so to speak.
Fair enough. Now for the brilliant bit.
Several Dutch bloggers were annoyed enough by this to start a counter offensive: “terug naar je maker” (back to your maker). If you dislike getting creationist propaganda through your letter box, send it back. They set up a website and included nice, polite example letters to make your viewpoint clear. So far, so ordinary.
But then some bright spark downloaded the leaflet from Kees’ own website, then produced an annotated version explaining just what’s wrong with it… It’s a brilliant way of turning creationist propaganda into just another tool to explain evolution, a very teachable moment.
The same person also found out who’s really behind it, as the people who produced the leaflet used an old template identifying the organisation they worked for: the Schreeuw om Leven (Scream for Life) anti-abortion foundation set up by Bert Dorenbos, the ex-director
of the Evangelistische Omroep (Evangelical Broadcaster). And where do we know the EO from? Exactly, from censoring the evolution bits out of David Attenborough wildlife documentaries…
The Diversity of Life – E. O. Wilson
The Diversity of Life
E. O. Wilson
424 pages
published in 1992
The Diversity of Life is the first E. O. Wilson book I’ve ever read and I finished it impressed. Writing science books aimed at a lay audience is not an easy job to do, having to explain difficult concepts to an audience of whom you can’t assume they have the background to understand them immediately. And you need to do this without boring your audience or telling too many lies-to-children. E. O. Wilson manages to do this with a concept as big and fuzzy as biological diversity, is a tribute to his writing.
Wilson is a biologist, who first rode to a certain amount of fame and infamity in the seventies, for popularising the concept of sociobiology. As a biologist he spent a large part of his career studying social insects, especially ants, from the study of which he also derived some of his ideas about sociobiology. For his research he spent quite some time in developing countries, seeing the ongoing destruction of wild habitats up close, so it’s no wonder that he became a passionate environmentalist.
Scratch another dearly loved sf myth
New research seems to show mordern human evolution is supercharged:
In a study published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone — around the period of the Stone Age — has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.
“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.”
The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, Hawks says, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival. Adds Hawks: “We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”
Science fiction’s dirty little secret is that it tends to believe in pseudoscience more often than it does in real science; even supposedly “hard” science fiction is littered with impossible or just wrong science. The idea that evolution has “stopped” is one of them, usually used in a setting which contrasts the brave manly colonists of Proycon B with the teeming soulles dependent masses ruled by an incompetent, corrupt bureaucracy of Earth. So much for that idea.
David Attenborough not happy with EO censorship
More than three months ago it emerged that the Dutch broadcaster EO had censored Attenborough’s Life of Mammals series, by removing references to evolution. Since they were an Evangelical broadcaster, evolution did not fit in with their beliefs. Now it seems somebody has told Richard Attenborough himself and he is not happy:
The world’s best known wildlife broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough, has called on the BBC to stop Christian fundamentalists from deleting references to evolution from his documentaries.
Censored versions of Sir David’s award winning programmes have been broadcast in Holland without any references to evolution, speciation, descent and timescales of millions of years, after being censored by Christian creationists who are opposed to Charles Darwin’s ideas.
“Instead of saying “70 million years ago, something happens,” they say “a very long time ago something happens”. They also omit paragraphs such as: “This is inherited from my warm-blooded ancestors,”” Sir David told the Telegraph. “I would much rather they kept to the letter, as far as that is possible, of what I said.”
The edits by the public broadcasting organisation Evangelische Omroep (EO, Evangelical Broadcasting) have triggered howls protests about “deviations and sins of omission” from Dutch scientists, led by Dr Gerdien de Jong, an evolutionary biologist at Utrecht University.
With Dr Hans Roskam of the University of Leiden, she has organised a petition, signed by more than 300 biologists, including 50 professors, and letters of complaint to the Director General of the BBC, the director of the BBC Natural History Unit, and Sir David.
“I am entirely on the side of the biologist in Utrecht,” said Sir David. “The BBC should take steps to make sure that the minuteness of the meanings are maintained.”
So far the publicity about their censorship has not persuaded the EO to give up their practises. Hopefully pressure from Attenborough on the BBC and from the BBXC on the EO will do the job. If not, the EO should not be allowed to broadcast Attenborough’s series anymore.