The Friends of Charles Darwin

Larry Moran over at the Sandwalk and PZ Myers at Pharyngula both encourage us to read This Week's Citation Classic: Gould and Lewontin's The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.

I have just re-read the paper, and can confirm that, 28 years after its original publication, it is as relevant as ever. The one-line summary:

One must not confuse the fact that a structure is used in some way […] with the primary evolutionary reason for its existence and conformation.

But don't trust to one-line summaries; the paper is well worth 20 minutes of your time.

What else are you going to do on a Sunday morning? Everyone else is at church!

Spotted in my garden last weekend:

Is it a twig, or is it a caterpillar?

Isn't Natural Selection utterly amazing? I would never have spotted this creature had it not, rather stupidly, taken up residence on a fence, rather than the branch of a tree. As a rule, fences tend not to have twigs.

The delay in posting this photo was due to my unsuccessful attempts to identify the species in question. My best guess at the moment is that it is the caterpillar of the world-famous peppered moth—which would be rather cool. Apparently, it isn't just adult peppered moths that come in a variety of camouflaged colours, hence my uncertainty.

I will get to the bottom of this one.

Pat. not yet pending.

[Post copied from my other website because it's about birds.]

I've decided to do something about the jackdaws stealing all the nuts from my bird feeder. Jen won't let me have a gun, as she suspects (correctly) that I would use it to shoot cats. So, this afternoon, I invented Carter's Jackdaw-Resistant Bird Feeder™.

I say jackdaw-resistant because them crows are damn devious. I'm sure their cunning bird brains will eventually overcome the challenge. In the meantime, the tits^* should be able to feed untroubled.

Oh, and it's a hell of a lot easier to fill than the traditional bird feeders.

That's nuts and tits in the same post. Should help the ratings.

Last week's edition of BBC Radio 4's The Material World (which you can listen to online here) began with an excellent interview with Professor Mike Majerus, the geneticist and lepidopterist who first identified weaknesses in some of Bernard Kettlewell's classic experiments investigating industrial melanism in peppered moths, along with Jerry Coyne, who first wrote about Majerus's findings in Nature magazine.

The interview explains how the experimental weaknesses were blown out of all proportion by creationists, who saw the flawed experiments as somehow disproving evolution. It goes on to explain how Majerus has painstakingly repeated Kettlewell's experiments, having carefully removed the flaws, and verified Kettlewell's original findings. It also makes a lie of the claim often made against evolution that it is unscientific because it makes no predictions by predicting that industrial melanism in moths will continue to decline in the UK, now that the air is a lot cleaner, whereas it will start to rise in countries where pollution is on the rise, such as China and India.

A fascinating programme. (The second half contains an interview with the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Sir Martin Evans, which is also pretty interesting.)

Royal Society, 'Exploring our archives': Life after Hooke

The Hooke folio is now online and searchable at http://webapps.qmul.ac.uk/cell/Hooke/Hooke.html while the visually stunning 'turning the pages' can be found at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/library/HookeTTP/hooke_broadband.htm.

Utterly awesome. Think Indiana Jones's dad's notebook, but with actual science. I'm so glad we managed to keep this folio in the UK.

As it's Sunday, how about a dollop of biblical literalism?

King James Bible: Genesis I (v. 3–4)

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good…

In other words, God created light and only realised after the event that it was good.

So much for 'Intelligent Design'!

your Great Barrier Reef, and your Galápagos Islands; a British wood in autumn really takes some beating:

A British wood earlier today.

If they were good enough for Darwin, I reckon they'll do for me.

Francisco J. Ayala, University Professor and the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine writes:

The following announcement may be of interest to your membership.

This is the second in a series of 10 colloquia I am organizing with Prof. John Avise, sponsored by the US National Academy of Sciences, under the umbrella "In the Light of Evolution" (ILE). We are planning 2 ILE colloquia in honor of Darwin's 200 anniversary in 2009: January 16-17, "ILE IV: Two Centuries of Darwin"; December, ILE V: TBA.

Please also see my recent book, Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion.

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December 6-8, 2007
In the Light of Evolution II: Biodiversity and Extinction
Organizers:  John C. Avise, Stephen P. Hubbell, and Francisco J. Ayala
Beckman Center of the National Academies, Irvine, CA

Darwin’s experience as a natural historian contributed greatly to his explanation of evolution by natural selection, which stands as one of the grand intellectual achievements in the history of science. The Earth’s exuberant biodiversity is a wellspring for scientific curiosity and discovery about nature’s workings. Bringing together leading researchers and students interested in biodiversity from evolutionary as well as ecological perspectives, this colloquium seeks to synthesize recent discoveries and concepts regarding the global abundance and distribution of biodiversity, and to compare the biodiversity patterns to conditions in the near and distant evolutionary past, as well as to those plausible in the near-term future. A preliminary program can be viewed at www.nasonline.org/Sackler_biodiversity_program.

$250 EARLY REGISTRATION UNTIL NOVEMBER 1, 2007
Attendance at the Colloquium is limited to 250 registered individuals. Registrations will be accepted only when the registration fee is included and in the order in which they are received. The EARLY registration fee ($250) includes the cost of meals, reception, and banquet.

$150 STUDENT / POST DOC REGISTRATION UNTIL NOVEMBER 1, 2007 - TRAVEL/HOTEL AWARDS AVAILABLE
A reduced all-inclusive (meals, reception, and banquet) registration fee of $150 is offered to Graduate Students and Postdocs who register by November 1, 2007. The NAS has provided funds to supplement the expenses of participating graduate students and postdocs up to $125 for hotel costs and up to $300 for air travel.  Awards will be granted with priority based exclusively on the order in which requests (accompanied by the registration fee) are received.  Notification of the award will be made shortly after receiving the application but the awards will be paid after the Colloquium, upon documentation of qualifying expenses.

After November 1, 2007 - All Registrations are $350

Register at www.nasonline.org/Sackler_biodiversity

Those awfully nice chaps at the Beagle Project have opened their very own online shop.

T-shirts, mugs, badges, bags, coasters, stickers, you name it, they'll sell you one. You can even buy a T-shirt for your dog! No self-respecting pooch should be without one.

Every purchase you make will add funds to the project's coffers, making that replica ship one step closer to reality.

Dig deep!