darwin

17 Nov 09

Darwin's finches tracked to reveal evolution in action : Nature News

A husband and wife team has spotted what could be the beginning of a new species of finch on one of the Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin developed his ideas about evolution.

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evolution darwin finches

26 Oct 09

Darwin's Robots | h+ Magazine

This experiment in swarm robotics shows both the coordination of multi-robot systems consisting of large numbers of simple physical robots and the evolution of collective communication behaviors. The study of artificial swarm intelligence as well as the biological studies of insects, ants, and other swarms in nature provides insight into the nature of intelligence in general, and offers an interesting perspective on the nature of Darwinian selection, competition, and cooperation.

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robots darwin intelligence evolution CDC AZB

22 Sep 09

The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins: review - Telegraph

Steve Jones hails Richard Dawkins's new book, which brings together his thinking on Darwin

www.telegraph.co.uk/...by-Richard-Dawkins-review.html - Preview

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17 Sep 09

The Evolution of Morality : The Primate Diaries

Morality is the final domain that theists cling to in order to justify the existence of God. They argue that, without a supernatural deity (or deities), there would be no reason for people to be kind with one another and we would be constantly at each other's throats. The view of Darwinian evolution as "nature, red in tooth and claw" is pervasive and theists perceive that the absence of God is the absence of moral sense. However, this façade is cracking around its very foundation as a steady flow of observational evidence reveals it to be one more bit of fallacious reasoning.

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Darwin social-darwinism morality 150

Australian art takes evolutionary turn - Book Reviews - Books - Entertainment

The connection between Darwin, art and Australia is the hook that successfully picks up otherwise disparate historical topics in Jeanette Hoorn's Reframing Darwin. This collection of essays accompanied an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne and develops some of the links between Darwinism and Australian art already well known from F. W. and J. M. Nicholas's Darwin in Australia. But this book also presents a few entirely surprising associations. With an illustration on every page, Reframing Darwin offers genuinely new and readable scholarship in an elegant package.

www.smh.com.au/...1251570704249.html - Preview

Darwin evolution art

07 Sep 09

Watching the evolution of the “Origin of Species”

The idea that we can actually see change over time in a person’s thinking is fascinating. Darwin scholars are of course familiar with this story, but here we can view it directly, both on a macro-level as it animates, or word-by-word as we examine pieces of the text more closely.

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Darwin writing evolution

DARWIN'S INTELLECTUAL LEGACY TO THE 21ST CENTURY (Edge)

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evolution Darwin culture science

30 Aug 09

The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler

In this review Simon Underdown disagrees with the premise that racism is part of evolution, rather than a crime

www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp - Preview

150 social-darwinism evolution Darwin

29 Aug 09

Evolver Zone

A 10 lecture series presented by Stanford University in their continuing studies course entitled “Darwin’s Legacy”. Features lectures by Eugenie Scott, Janet Browne, Daniel Dennett, Peter and Rosemary Grant, Niles Eldredge, Paul Ewald, Russell Fernald, and several others.

www.evolverzone.com/?tag=janet-browne&display_preference=full - Preview

Darwin evolution

Browne on Social Darwinism

Janet Browne: Darwin's Origin of Species, A Biography
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.
[excerpt]

www.laurenhasten.com/browne.htm - Preview

social-darwinism evolution 150 Darwin darwinism

a struggle for existence among nations and races
the notorious doctrine of 'social Darwinism' took
the idea of success to justify social and economic policies in which struggle
was the driving force
12 more annotations...
- more closely connected with Herbert Spencer's pervasive social
  evolutionism. Spencer's nostrum of "survival of the fittest" was well
  suited to describe economic expansion, rapid adaptation to circumstance and
  colonization
- legitimize the competition that flourished
  in free-enterprise Victorian capitalism
- These commitments were heavily biased towards the political right.
  Few such thinkers believed in socialism or state support for the poor. A welfare
  state or subsidized industry, it was assumed, would encourage idleness and permit
  an increasing number of "unfit" people or firms to survive, thereby
  undermining economic and social progress and national health -- an obvious resurgence
  of Malthus's original ideas, now poured back into economic thought with a fully
  "scientific" backing provided by Darwin.
- A fairly typical view was expressed by Karl Pearson
  (1857-1936), the committed Darwinian biologist and London statistician. No one
  should regret, he said in 1900, that "a capable and stalwart race of white
  men should replace a dark-skinned tribe which can neither utilize its land for
  the full benefit of mankind, nor contribute its quota to the common stock of
  human knowledge."
- Eugenics was given its name and leading principles by Francis
  Galton in the 1880s
- The human race would deteriorate, he declared, unless policies were
  introduced to reduce breeding rates among what he categorized as the poorer,
  unfit, profligate elements of society and promote higher rates among the worthy
  middle classes.
- Whereas in Darwin's
  day eugenics was mainly expressed in fears about the maintenance of biological
  fitness, in the early twentieth century it expanded through Europe and the Americas
  into significant political movements seeking to change government policy with
  public health measures for the masses, birth control and enforced restraint
  from breeding. At root, the old system of Malthusian checks that Darwin had
  applied to biology was reapplied to political economies with compelling biological
  support. The poor, the deranged, the weak and diseased came to be regarded as
  biological burdens on society. For the good of the nation, it was said, policies
  should be introduced to prevent them from reproducing their kind.
- criminologists
  such as the Italian writer Cesare Lombroso proposed that there were physical
  stigmata to be seen in social deviants.
- unfit individuals could be identified by "signs" and then
  removed from society.
- he first task was to identify those who should not reproduce. Hereditary forms
  of mental disorder became the main target.
- the
  study of human evolution into a science of racial fixity that legitimized contemporary
  prejudices
- precipitated academic
  warfare between social scientists and biologists, the former favouring cultural
  explanations of racial differences, the latter inbuilt physical and biological
  parameters.

28 Aug 09

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea | Open Culture

Why did so many find Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection so subversive and disconcerting straight from the beginning? American philosopher Daniel Dennett explains.

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Dennett evolution Darwin natural-selection

16 Aug 09

Lamarck beat Darwin to the tree : Genetic Future

Ironically, the earliest use of the tree analogy diagram to depict evolution was published in the year of Darwin's birth (1809) by Lamarck in his book Philosophie Zoologique (see pg 463, http://tinyurl.com/knt7vr).

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evolution tree-of-life Darwin

12 Aug 09

Early Theories of Evolution: Darwin and Natural Selection

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Darwin evolution natural-selection

06 Aug 09

Darwin's First Clues

The journey of young Charles Darwin aboard His Majesty's Ship Beagle, during the years 1831-36, is one of the best known and most neatly mythologized episodes in the history of science. As the legend goes, Darwin sailed as ship's naturalist on the Beagle, visited the Galápagos archipelago in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and there beheld giant tortoises and finches. The finches, many species of them, were distinguishable by differently shaped beaks, suggesting adaptations to particular diets. The tortoises, island by island, carried differently shaped shells. (National Geographic Magazine)

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Darwin evolution Galapagos

30 Jul 09

Time and Life: Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" (1859)

Huxley

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evolution Darwin Huxley

22 Jul 09

On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution (discussion)

I would like to invite discussion on my paper, On Fodor on Darwin On Evolution, which is a critique of Jerry Fodor's Hugues Leblanc Lectures at UQAM on "What Darwin Got Wrong" (Fodor, forthcoming; Fodor&Piatelli-Palmarini). Reponses follow.

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Darwin Fodor evolution natural-selection

16 Jul 09

LRB · letters page from Vol. 29 No. 21

Blackburn and other react to Fofor's Why Pigs Don't Have Wings

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Fodor evolution Darwin adaptationism

here is the philosopher of biology Elliott Sober’s solution to the problem, which he gave in 1984, and which is basically the same as Fodor’s own implicit proposal: ‘“Selection of” pertains to the effects of a selection process, whereas “selection for” describes its causes. To say there is selection for a given property means that having the property causes success in survival and reproduction.’ If a property doesn’t cause success in survival and reproduction, but is linked to one that does, then there is no selection for that property.

LRB · letters page from Vol. 29 No. 22

Coyne and Kitcher react to Fodor's Why Pigs Don't Have Wings

www.lrb.co.uk/...letters.html - Preview

Fodor adaptationism evolution Darwin

Whiteness and camouflage (along with protein balances and forms of genetic material) are candidates ‘for’ natural selection because they figure in the causal history of the changes in the bears; being a Thursday’s cub isn’t a candidate because it doesn’t play a comparable causal role.
The rival mechanisms Fodor cites are supplements to natural selection, not replacements.
7 more annotations...
- The constraints of development may tell us why an eye, for example, has a particular form (our retina lies behind the blood vessels and nerves that feed it because retinas evolved from everted portions of the brain), but they cannot tell us why eyes are there in the first place. They are there because the gradual acquisition of vision gave animals a leg up in the evolutionary struggle for existence.
- many features of organisms can be by-products of evolution rather than the direct objects of natural selection.
- evo-devo drives home the importance of the fact that in addition to the information in the genes (the ‘recipes’ for making offspring), there is information in the developmental processes (the ‘readers’ of the recipes), and both together need to be considered in a good explanation of the resulting phenotypes, since the interactions between them can be surprising.
- Fodor’s mistake, which he is hardly alone in making, is to suppose that if our minds are scientifically explicable bio-mechanisms, then there could not be any room at all for values.
- Jerry Fodor’s attack on ultra-Darwinian pan-adaptationism (and Flintstone evolutionary psychology) is spot on, but he does less than justice to Darwin, or to modern pluralistic evolutionary theory.
- organisms select environments just as environments select organisms.
- Modern selection theory (in the hands of other than ultra-Darwinists) recognises multiple levels at which selection works: gene, genome, organism (phenotype), population and species. It also recognises that what evolves is not an adult phenotype but an entire developmental system (faster-running antelopes do not emerge fully grown). By contrast with pan-adaptationism, pluralistic evolutionary theory recognises the presence of spandrels (non-adaptive features of a phenotype, such as the red colour of blood) and exaptations: features originally selected with one function which then come to have another, such as feathers, which were a thermo-regulatory mechanism before they took on their role in flying birds.

12 Jul 09

Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism

Gould - The New York Review of Books

www.nybooks.com/1139 - Preview

Gould evolution adaptationism Darwin

The "fundamentalists" among evolutionary theorists revel in the belief that one overarching law—Darwin's central principle of natural selection—can render the full complexity of outcomes (by working in conjunction with auxiliary principles, like sexual reproduction, that enhance its rate and power).
Evolutionary psychology could, in my view, become a fruitful science by replacing its current penchant for narrow, and often barren, speculation with respect for the pluralistic range of available alternatives that are just as evolutionary in status, more probable in actual occurrence, and not limited to the blinkered view that evolutionary explanations must identify adaptations produced by natural selection.
8 more annotations...
- punctuated equilibrium is the dominant pattern of evolutionary change in the history of living organisms. This theory, formulated by Niles Eldredge and me in 1972, proposes that the two most general observations made by palentologists form a genuine and primary pattern of evolution, and do not arise as artifacts of an imperfect fossil record. The first observation notes that mostnew species originate in ageological "moment." The second holds that species generally do not change in any substantial or directional way during their geological lifetimes—usually a long period averaging five to ten million years for fossil invertebrate species.
- In his second attack, Dennett denigrates the importance of nonadaptive side consequences ("spandrels" in my terminology) as sources for later and fruitful reuse.
- spandrels define the major category of important evolutionary features that do not arise as adaptations.
- Dennett denies theoretical importance to the roles of contingency and chance in the history of life, a history that hasfew predictable particulars and no inherent directionality, especially given the persistence of bacteria as the most common and dominant form of life on Earth ever since their origin as the first fossilized creatures some 3.5 billion years ago.
- Cultural (or memetic) change manifestly operates on the radically different substrate of Lamarckian inheritance, or the passage of acquired characters to subsequent generations. Whatever we invent in our lifetimes, we can pass on to our children by our writing and teaching. Evolutionists have long understood that Darwinism cannot operate effectively in systems of Lamarckian inheritance—for Lamarckian change has such a clear direction, and permits evolution to proceed so rapidly, that the much slower process of natural selection shrinks to insignificance before the Lamarckian juggernaut.
- Wright presents no neurological evidence of a brain module for sweetness, and no paleontological data about ancestral feeding. This "just-so story" therefore cannot stand as a "classic example of an adaptation" in any sense deserving the name of science.
- But how can we possibly obtain the key information that would be required to show the validity of adaptive tales about an EEA: relations of kinship, social structures and sizes of groups, different activities of males and females, the roles of religion, symbolizing, storytelling, and a hundred other central aspects of human life that cannot be traced in fossils?
- Moreover, this interdigitation implies that human cultural change needn't even follow genealogical lines—the most basic requirement of a Darwinian evolutionary process—for even the most distant cultural lineages can borrow from each other with ease. If we want a biological metaphor for cultural change, we should probably invoke infection rather than evolution.

09 Jul 09

Darwinian Fundamentalism

Gould review in The New York Review of Books

www.nybooks.com/1151 - Preview

evolution Darwin fundamentalism Gould adaptationism

"I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification."
the ultra-Darwinists share a conviction that natural selection regulates everything of any importance in evolution, and that adaptation emerges as a universal result and ultimate test of selection's ubiquity.
10 more annotations...
- the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success
- The generally accepted result of natural selection is adaptation—the shaping of an organism's form, function, and behavior to achieve the Darwinian summum bonum of enhanced reproductive success.
- But selection cannot suffice as a full explanation for many aspects of evolution; for other types and styles of causes become relevant, or even prevalent, in domains both far above and far below the traditional Darwinian locus of the organism.
- developmental biologists have documented an astonishing "conservation," or close similarity, of basic pathways of development among phyla that have been evolving independently for at least 500 million years, and that seem so different in basic anatomy (insects and vertebrates, for example).
- the ultras' philosophical manifesto of pure adaptationism
- Our problem is that, in many adaptive stories, the protagonist does not show dead-obvious signs of Design
- Natural selection does not explain why many evolutionary transitions from one nucleotide to another are neutral, and therefore nonadaptive. Natural selection does not explain why a meteor crashed into the earth 65 million years ago, setting in motion the extinction of half the world's species.
- the neutral theory of molecular evolution
- Natural selection is evolution's basic crane; all other cranes (sexual reproduction, for example) act as mere auxiliaries to boost the speed or power of natural selection in constructing organisms of good design.
- evolution includes so much more than natural selection that it cannot be algorithmic in Dennett's simple calculational sense

Rudy Garns's Library tagged darwin → View Popular

Darwin's finches tracked to reveal evolution in action : Nature News

Darwin's Robots | h+ Magazine

The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins: review - Telegraph

The Evolution of Morality : The Primate Diaries

Australian art takes evolutionary turn - Book Reviews - Books - Entertainment

Watching the evolution of the “Origin of Species”

DARWIN'S INTELLECTUAL LEGACY TO THE 21ST CENTURY (Edge)

The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler

Evolver Zone

Browne on Social Darwinism

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea | Open Culture

Lamarck beat Darwin to the tree : Genetic Future

Early Theories of Evolution: Darwin and Natural Selection

Darwin's First Clues

Time and Life: Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" (1859)

On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution (discussion)

LRB · letters page from Vol. 29 No. 21

LRB · letters page from Vol. 29 No. 22

Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism

Darwinian Fundamentalism

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