Disputes and controversies in science are always a good thing. They're fun to read about (and to write about), and they're bellwethers of the health of the enterprise. Moreover, they tend to stimulate thought and experimentation. Whether scientists are bickering about evo-devo, or about stem cells in cancer, or about prebiotic chemistry, and whether or not the climate is genial or hostile, the result is valuable.
Chapter 9 is called "Ends and Odds." Chapter 10 is "Beyond the Reach of Chance." Between them, they advance a straw man so idiotic that I wonder whether Meyer will be able to reclaim any significant intellectual integrity in the chapters that follow. I've already noted that this is not a book of science or of serious scholarship. Now it seems that it doesn't even merit the distinction of popular science or pop philosophy.
Welcome to Quintessence of Dust and to the 14th Edition of the monthly Carnival of Evolution. Thanks for stopping by, and for supporting scientific carnivalia, members of a taxon that seems to be flirting with extinction. One good reason to visit a carnival: brain stimulation.
The Notch signaling pathway is a golden oldie of genetics in two ways.
Consider these not-so-random samples from the animal world: a cockroach, a zebrafish, a mouse. What do these creatures have in common? Left to right: American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), zebrafish (Danio rerio), house mouse (Mus musculus). Cockroach image from Wikimedia Commons, zebrafish and mouse from Wellcome Images. Well, they're all animals and that means they're all eukaryotes, for example. They all have DNA-based genomes.
Recently I was reading a superb review article [doi] on the subject of a famous and important cellular signaling pathway called the Notch pathway.
About 2 months ago, I finished a series on Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge of Evolution. I concluded that it was a terrible book, displaying significant errors of both fact and judgment. The book's main argument is a population genetics argument, and Behe seems to have little knowledge or understanding of that difficult subject.
It's exciting to live in the era of evolutionary genomics, when new genomes are being published approximately once a week, and the light of genomic analysis is being trained on more and more branches of the tree of life.
Charles Darwin collected all sorts of cool stuff (like a vampire bat, caught while feeding on his horse) on his journey aboard the Beagle, and it has to be said that he understood little of it until after he got back. The finches that bear his name were identified as such by someone else, and his own bird collections from the Galapagos were nearly worthless due to the fact that he hadn't bothered to label specimens as to their place of origin.
The wing of a bat is an amazing thing. It's not just a wing; it's clearly a modified mammalian limb. A bat looks like a lot like a rodent with really long, webbed fingers on elongated arms. Image from Animal Diversity Web at the University of Michigan.