1. Let's Get Rid of Darwinism

Comment #212093 by riemann on July 16, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Wolbachia can have a number of effects, but one of the most common is to kill all a female's sons.

I don't wanna digress but, how is killing all sons evolutionarily stable? Surely they need some of the male insects to survive (and reproduce) in order not to go extinct along with their hosts. Unless the asymmetry of survival&reproduction between Wolbachia and its host is exceedingly large, i can't see how this would work. A little help?

Edit: Wikipedia suggests that Wolbachia induces thelytoky to its host and therefore by-passes males altogether. Well, i don't think it gets any more asymmetrical than that.. :))

2. An Irishman's Diary

Comment #209438 by riemann on July 12, 2008 at 8:22 am

Layla Nasreddin: Speaking of grammatical pedantry, is there a reason that letters to the Times are addressed as "Sir" and not "Sir or Madam"? Is it just tradition?

I'd bet my money on tradition, probably from times when "our consciousness were not raised by feminists" (boy how i longed to use this phrase in a sentence). Must be one of those memes which outlived its justifiability, waiting to be put out of its lexical misery by a more neutral one.

3. An Irishman's Diary

Comment #208873 by riemann on July 11, 2008 at 10:34 am

I was quite confident that Richard's remarks were taken out of context when i read this, so i decided to track down the offending article to be sure. And here it is:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article4295700.ece

Not much of a context, to be honest. Wonder what prompted him to write this..

4. PLEASE WRITE IN SUPPORT OF PZ MYERS

Comment #208128 by riemann on July 10, 2008 at 3:53 pm

From Turkey, written, sent and friends are encouraged to participate. Hope it'll make a difference.

5. An Original Confession

Comment #207399 by riemann on July 9, 2008 at 4:51 pm

Our man Dawkins has provided us with an audio version that is characteristically well done

I second that. Not only his editing out the bits where Darwin eventually turned out to be mistaken is a sure sign of what you are about to listen are the parts that actually matters (from a scientific point of view that is), his very intonation of Darwin's characteristically Victorian prose often helps you pinpoint what that otherwise inaccesible, a-paragraph-long sentence, is all about.

Btw, who is this Olivia Judson person? Surely sounds like someone i'd like to read more often, better check her writings out.

6. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #206226 by riemann on July 8, 2008 at 7:24 am

A Hitchensian joke is called for after all this drivel:

- What do you call a theist who can follow an argument?
- An oxymoron.

7. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #205607 by riemann on July 7, 2008 at 2:00 pm

al-rawandi: The man is a fraud, and recognized as such even in Turkey.

I have doubts about that. The law certainly recognised him as a fraud, but vast majority of people in Turkey think that evolution is false and Darwinism is yet another Christian plot against Muslims precisely because of this man.

I have in my shelf another one of his books called Evrim Aldatmacasi (Deception of Evolution), which by its rather confident and fluently styled prose (lies, one should say) presumably delayed my personal understanding of natural selection for a good 3 years or so. And i too, following Richard, opened a page at random in this rather nostalgic book, on which the heading reads "Imaginary Intermediate Form Archaepteryx" and devotes the next 5 pages to developing the theme, only to conclude the section without any real punch line, but with all sorts of non-sequiturs. Another page at random, and he argues that the odds for a protein consisting of 500 aminoacids to come into existence "by chance alone" is 10 to the power of 950. He's graphic about it too; a page half full of zeros is bound to make an impact on an uneducated reader. Another page, how second law of thermodynamics is a direct refutation of evolution.

There's even a quotation from Richard, where he talks about Cambrian explosion and the fact that oldest major invertebrate forms are found there, as if not having evolved at all, not having ancestors, and how this fact please Creationists. Yahya somehow sees this as a bashful concession on Richard's part and says with all sincerety "See how Dawkins agrees with us?"

All in all, nothing new under the sun, same old Creationist lies. The effect on people at large, however, is dramatically different than that of Western world. As i said, for many people in Turkey, these books mark the definitive demise of evolutinary theory, not even a version of Intelligent Design theory is proposed or entertained as an alternative, as is the case in US. Why water things down when there is no real opposition? This is directly accounted by the "ignorance and stupidity of the target audience" as Richard suggests. Lay people here, for whatever reasons, are more than eager to take this nonsense at face value. He could, for instance, just as well write about how Lamarck was more to the point regarding evolution, therefore Darwinisim was false and i bet few would see the obviously preposterous slight of hands. No need for a reality check when the overall grip on reality is severely lobotomized. Shame for a country that is constitutionally secular.

Remember that poll conducted in 34 industrial countries to determine the level of support for evolution, where US came 33rd? Well, Turkey was 34th and everytime that chart comes up in an American lecture, the speaker jokes almost universally "Well, at least we beat Turkey!" That could be deemed as an even bigger (rhetorical) victory, were it not for the propoganda of Harun Yahya. Turkey would almost certainly beat any other Muslim country on that poll, but that sure rings like a hollow victory, if there ever was one.

8. Thinking ahead: Bacteria anticipate coming changes in their environment

Comment #196449 by riemann on June 20, 2008 at 1:56 am

Fair point, King of NH, but there are fundamental differences between how a bacterium regulates its behaviour and, for instance, we do. As in any aspect of nature, there are of course all sorts of intermediate stages from fully genetically determined bactaria behaviour to not-so-much genetically determined human behaviour, which Dan Dennett dubbed "The Tower of Generate-And-Test." You can check out what he means from the link below. Seen in this light, the difference between cognition or lack of it really, functionally matters. Therefore phrases like "thinking" and "learning" cannot be used as mere metaphors with vauge definitions. That's the reason i objected to the conclusions of the experiment.

http://everything2.com/e2node/Tower of generate-and-test

9. Thinking ahead: Bacteria anticipate coming changes in their environment

Comment #196345 by riemann on June 19, 2008 at 6:25 pm

This is truely exciting and scientific way of thinking at its best. However i have one difficulty getting my head around. I fail to see how this new emergent adaptation is one that's "learned" by the bacteria, rather than a particular genetic variaton selected by artificial selection to adapt to the newly introduced feeding patterns.

"And sure enough, after a few thousand generations, an ecologically fit strain of microbe emerged which did exactly that. This happened for every pattern of cues that the researchers tried."

This sentence highly suggests to me that it's ordinary selection at work, not an undetermined (by genes that is) way of dealing with enviroment at large, or even one determined but with a loose leash. I am not even sure what anything less than a fully determined trait would mean for a bacteria. Surely it's not the individual bacterium that acquires the new trick, but its descandants? The best i can relate to the premise of this experiment is this: "Genetic variation to adapt for any feeding pattern exists almost readily for bacteria, and therefore the ones that have these variations tend to fare better than the rest of them." Right? But isn't this the very definition of natural selection? If so, what's the fuss all about? I am sure though it's me who's missing a point, rather than the researchers. Further elobarations would be much appreciated.

10. Darwinmania!

Comment #195413 by riemann on June 18, 2008 at 7:27 am

Just a note on the t-shirts:
Richard Dawkins said that if we purchase items through this website, the RDFoundation gets a kickback.
Could we get a link to Darwin t-shirts from this site?

I was just thinking the same thing. It would also be very cool if Richard worked out a way to make his famous "Evolution: The greatest show on earth, the only game in town." t-shirt available for sale for this occasion. It could even be a good idea, till the end of celebrations, to offer them free of charge as a gift to those who buy stuff from/via our site. Wonder if that's feasible? In any case the resurrection of that endangered t-shirt would be a very Darwinian event indeed, in both senses.

11. Darwin still causing waves after 150 years

Comment #188729 by riemann on June 4, 2008 at 12:29 pm

@JLD:

Well The Blind Watchmaker comes to mind, by far the clearest exposition of natural selection, i think. Not a short book admitedly, but so very sweet. There's also the "Evolution - What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters" by Donald R. Prothero, about which Michael Shermer commented "The best damn book about evolution - period!" But if it's "top to bottom" insight you want, i don't think it gets any better than Maynard Smith's "The Theory of Evolution", not necessarily short or sweet, but definitely to the point. Coping with selection pressures is all about trade offs, you see.. :)) Needless to say, Dawkins' upcoming book bound to be a contender in this category.

12. The Lava Lizard's Tale

Comment #131365 by riemann on February 22, 2008 at 10:48 am

While waiting for the next two tales, here's another would-be tale by Richard in case some of you had missed it; The Komodo Dragon's Tale.

http://www.richarddawkins.net/article,452,The-Komodo-Dragons-Tale,Richard-Dawkins

13. The Lava Lizard's Tale

Comment #131193 by riemann on February 22, 2008 at 3:39 am

If this were to be inserted into The Ancestor's Tale, where would it go?

I think it would be under Sauropsids, Concestor 16..

14. Is Evolution Predictable?

Comment #127630 by riemann on February 15, 2008 at 1:25 pm

Anyone has another version of this video? there seems to be a problem with this one..

15. Darwin Day (Feb 12th) E-Cards

Comment #114369 by riemann on January 22, 2008 at 4:53 am

I realise it's not quite fair to Darwin, but here's one: Darwin is wearing a party hat, a background poster reads 'Happy Darwin Day', all sorts of animals and plants partying around, obviously a celebration thing going on. Darwin, having just opened his gift, The Selfish Gene, thinks (after Huxley) the following:

"How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that! This Dawkins fellow has got game."

16. Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life's Origin

Comment #74226 by riemann on September 27, 2007 at 8:23 pm

"I don't remember a single person asking me what the movie was about," he said in a telephone interview.

This sounds somewhat like the Paranoid Android Marvin, who knew the meaning of life, but didn't bother to tell anyone, because no one had ever asked him.

17. 1996 Richard Dimbleby Lecture

Comment #73018 by riemann on September 23, 2007 at 8:24 pm

Unweaving The Rainbow is the only Richard Dawkins product that i disagree with, as i wholeheartedly think that being alive is overall a purely wicked experience. But, oh boy, this speech (as well as the book), though brief, does provide some sense of awe in those moments when one feels most down and abashed. I wish science and the searching and understanding for wonders of the observable nature did come to me as natural as it comes to the Professor, instead my appreciation of the world via science was truely an acquired taste, acquired thanks primarily to Dawkins. I suspect it must be a borderline supernatural experince to contemplate the universe and its harmony from his point of view, through his mental dispositons. Thomas Nagel once wanted to know what it was like to be a bat, i am a humble man, i would happily settle for knowing what it is like to be Richard Dawkins any day.

18. Fruit fly parasite's gene invasion raises questions over evolution

Comment #66780 by riemann on August 31, 2007 at 11:19 am

mdowe, i believe it comes as a suprise because although it is apparently yet another one of those rare exceptions to the weismann barrier (otherwise known as the continuity of germ-plasm), this particular exception occurs in a process that is rather common in nature, and therefore might have further implications about the course of evolution (not quite sure what they might be though). Would love to hear some expert comments.