[url=http://www.physorg.com/news115919015.html]University of Queensland research has found the “missing link” in the evolution of the eye.[/url][quote]“Charles Darwin wasn't able to reconcile the evolution of the eye given its complexities and diversity of eye designs,” Professor Collin said.

“So it was a major surprise for us that we have found what appears to be a clear progression from a simple eye to a complex eye, which occurred over a relatively short period (30 million years) in evolutionary history.”[/quote]

Happy Birthday, Alfred Russel Wallace
 

Olivia Judson gives [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace]Alfred Russel Wallace[/url] his props in her NY Times [i]Wild Side[/i] blog:

[url=http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/wallace-should-hang/index.html]Wallace Should Hang[/url]: [i]A celebration of biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose reputation as "Darwin’s rival" doesn’t do him justice.[/i]
[quote]These days, Wallace is most famous for his role in galvanizing Darwin. By 1858, Darwin (who was 14 years older than Wallace) had spent 20 years working on the idea of evolution by natural selection. He’d been thinking, collecting data, doing experiments. But so far, he had published nothing on the matter. When Wallace’s letter arrived, Darwin panicked. He was about to be scooped, just as Lyell had warned him he would be.

What happened next is an oft-told tale. Darwin wrote several distraught letters to Lyell and to his friend and confidant, the botanist Joseph Hooker. Within the fortnight, Lyell and Hooker attended a meeting of the Linnean Society in London, at which they announced the discovery of evolution by natural selection. To show that Darwin and Wallace had arrived at the idea of natural selection independently, they presented excerpts of two pieces by Darwin — an essay written in 1844 but not published, and a letter written in 1857 to the American botanist Asa Gray, which contained an outline of the principle of natural selection — and Wallace’s manuscript.

Neither Darwin nor Wallace was there: Darwin was at home in Kent, mourning the death of one of his children from scarlet fever, and Wallace was now in New Guinea, hunting birds of paradise. The meeting seems to have had little immediate impact on the scientific community: in his summary at the end of the year, the president of the society remarked that the year “has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.” But Darwin had had a fire lit under him, and less than 18 months after the Linnean Society meeting, “On the Origin of Species” was published, and the science of biology changed forever.

...

But to think of Wallace as a mere catalyst for Darwin, as “the other” guy, is to do him a gross injustice (though he himself contributed to this tendency, by always giving Darwin credit for having discovered natural selection, and referring to evolution by natural selection as “Darwinism”). Like so many of the Victorians, Wallace was a prolific writer. He published 21 books and hundreds of articles, often on subjects outside biology (such as why women should have the vote), and he was an important scientist and naturalist in his own right. For instance, besides discovering natural selection, he laid the foundations of biogeography — why you find particular plants and animals here, but not there. In the islands of Indonesia, for example, Wallace noticed that fauna and flora on one side of the deep Lombok Strait were mostly Asian, whereas those on the other side were related to Australian organisms. He reasoned correctly that this was a result of the difficulty organisms had in crossing the Strait; the discontinuity is now known as the Wallace Line.

He also made major contributions to a variety of other fields, from anthropology to the study of glaciers, and in a campaign against smallpox vaccination, which was then both compulsory and crude, he carried out one of the first large-scale statistical studies of medical evidence. In it, he remarks that “…there is much evidence to show that doctors are bad statisticians, and have a special faculty for misstating figures,” and called for proper controlled trials of the vaccine’s efficacy.

All of which is the more impressive given his upbringing and background. Born in 1823 to down-at-heel parents, he began to work for a living at the age of 14. From that point on, he was self-educated, and he worked as a surveyor, a watch-maker, a teacher and again as a surveyor before, at the age of 25, heading off aboard the “Mischief” to collect biological specimens in the Amazon. He had no official support for the trip: inspired the adventures of other collectors, including Darwin, he and a friend just set off, intending to earn money by selling their specimens in Britain. On his return voyage about four years later, the ship caught fire, and the bulk of his collections were lost. Undeterred, he soon set off again, this time for his adventures in Southeast Asia.

Yet Wallace makes a troublesome hero. In later years, he developed beliefs that are — for a scientist — embarrassing. He regularly attended séances, and became a believer in spirits (of the ethereal type, not the ones in bottles). He was a religious skeptic, but unlike Darwin, he was unable to accept that humans were a product of the same organic forces that produced all the other beings on the planet. He insisted evolution by natural selection could not have resulted in the human moral faculty; instead, he invoked the action of a mysterious “intelligence.”

Of all the facets of his character, though, one stands out most clearly: a profound humanity. He was biting in his criticisms of colonialism — “The white men in our colonies are too frequently the savages” — and when he came back to Britain, he championed a number of hopeless social causes, such as land nationalization, in the hopes of creating a more equitable and just society. He also worried about the planet, and how we (don’t) look after it. Here’s something he wrote in 1863:

[quote]
[i]If this [scientific investigation of tropical ecosystems] is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve; and while professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown.[/i]
[/quote]
[/quote]

In Life’s Web, Aiding Trees Can Kill Them
 

Interesting article on the evolution and mechanics of multi-species mutualism:

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/science/11ants.html]In Life’s Web, Aiding Trees Can Kill Them[/url]

[quote]A few years ago, Todd Palmer, an ecologist at the University of Florida, was walking past a fenced-off research site in Kenya when he noticed something curious: instead of thriving, acacia trees that were protected from leaf-eating elephants and giraffes were withering and dying.

“That struck me as paradoxical,” he said in a telephone interview this week from the site. “If you remove large herbivores, you should see more vigorous trees.”

Dr. Palmer and his colleagues investigated. Their findings, reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that relationships between plant and animal species can be far more complex than had been thought and that even seemingly benign interference can have devastating effects.

The acacias and a species of ant that colonize them live together in an arrangement called mutualism. The ants nest in the trees’ thorns and sip on their nectar; in return, they swarm out ferociously, ready to bite, when a tree is disturbed by an elephant, a giraffe or other grazing animal.

But somehow, Dr. Palmer said, the trees seem to sense when no one is munching on their leaves and, after a year or so, seemingly decide, “We are going to reduce our investment in ants” by not producing so many roomy thorns or so much tasty nectar. The ants’ responses — lassitude is one — eventually encourage wood-boring beetles to invade the trees. Soon their tunnels leave the trees sickly, dying or dead.

The finding shows that what looks like two-species mutualism may involve other species. And they offer new proof of the fragility of the web of life, a phenomenon observed, for example, when wolves vanish from mountain landscapes or sharks and other top marine predators are fished out of the marine food chain.

Without wolf predation, elk are freer to roam and eat more plants. Result: aspen begin to vanish. Similarly, the overfishing of sharks and similar large fish leave smaller, algae-eating fish free to graze unhindered on algae growing on (and feeding) coral. Result: dead coral.

Dr. Palmer said it was shocking to see how quickly the ant-acacia mutualism, evolved over thousands of years, “dissolved” once the herbivores were removed. Now, he said, he and his colleagues want to see if they can restore the old pattern by again allowing giraffes and elephants to feed on the trees. [/quote]

"Evolution As a Repeater"
 

Latest entry in Olivia Judson' NYTimes blog: Make sure to also check out the reader comments if you read the article:

[url]http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/the-repeater/index.html[/url]

[quote=ewmayer;86651]I'm starting this thread as a spinoff from the [URL="http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=6260"]Does God Exist?[/URL] discussion, because I think the scientific evidence for (and against, if someone can provide such) the Darwinian theory of [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution"]evolution by way of natural selection[/URL] and its later refinements (by such luminaries as the Huxleys, Mayr, Eldredge, Dawkins, Wilson, Gould and many, many others) deserves its own thread. If you think any posts in the progenitor thread also say enough about the scientific basis of evolutionary theory to warrant their being moved or copied here, please let me know.

[/quote]
To go back to post one, as an atheist I am allergic to the
concept of belief. But if you must know, I do "believe" in the
concept of evolution, and am on a par with Einstein when it
comes to what God is.

[QUOTE=davieddy;124392]To go back to post one, as an atheist I am allergic to the
concept of belief.[/QUOTE]No matter how you spin it, you will be cornered into admitting some sort of belief. Your claim of being an atheist means you believe there is no god. :evil:

[QUOTE=retina;124393]No matter how you spin it, you will be cornered into admitting some sort of belief. Your claim of being an atheist means you believe there is no god. :evil:[/QUOTE]

There is no God ... there is [or was] only the Almighty Prespacetime Quantum Fluctatory Field, which gave rise to all things, including sentient beings who mistakenly called their ignorance of It "God" and deluded themselves into thinking It "cared" for them.

[And there is also His Holiness the FSM, of course - may you be blessed by the touch of His Noodly Appendage. Praise be, and pray pass the Parmesan...]

[QUOTE=retina;124393]No matter how you spin it, you will be cornered into admitting some sort of belief. Your claim of being an atheist means you believe there is no god. :evil:[/QUOTE]I do not agree, as an agnostic I do not have a belief. As an atheist I do not construct a whole theory about an entity that has never been seen, heard, touched or weighted. An entity that is no measurable. Moreover I do not construct the whole history of the universe and my whole perception of the world about that entity ... and you call that a belief ?

The problem with faith and belief is that you have to say or feel at some moment, that you surrender your own judgment and you have to accept a dogma.

I did not surrender my ability to question to a belief when I concluded, as a 10 year old child, that all that chatter about gods was just the same as the stories about Santa Claus...

Jacob

[quote=ewmayer;124404]There is no God ... there is [or was] only the Almighty Prespacetime Quantum Fluctatory Field, which gave rise to all things, including sentient beings who mistakenly called their ignorance of It "God" and deluded themselves into thinking It "cared" for them.

[And there is also His Holiness the FSM, of course - may you be blessed by the touch of His Noodly Appendage. Praise be, and pray pass the Parmesan...][/quote]
Who was it who applied "Occam's razor" to the "many universes"
interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and observed that it was
"cheap on assumptions but very expensive on universes"?

PS "I'm very interested in the Universe and all that surrounds it" (Peter Cook)

Philosopher George [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana]Santayana[/url]'s famous aphorism "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" came to my mind while composing a post in the ongoing Subprime-Mortgae-Meltdown thread. While reviewing Santayana's wikipage, an interesting quote relevant to this discussion caught my eye:

[i]Like many of the classical pragmatists, and because he was also well-versed in evolutionary theory, Santayana was committed to a naturalist metaphysics, in which human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved so as to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment. Their value may then be adjudged by the extent to which they facilitate human happiness.[/i]

I find that a rather refreshing alternative to both religious dogmatism on the one hand, and to the cultural relativism which is oh so fashionable among the liberal élite on the other. The danger would seem to be if one chooses a strictly materialistic interpretation of "happiness".

Re: Why No Male Menopause?
 

[QUOTE=ewmayer;103645]It's said one needs to be careful in throwing stereotypes around, but that of the "May/December romance" (which occurs almost exclusively between an older male and a younger woman, and is an indulgence reserved almost entirely for men of above-average wealth and status) is so common that there simply has to be something deeper to it than the "old lecher" aspect, in the biological/evolutionary sense.[/QUOTE]

Great example of the attractiveness of older high-status men - especially good-looking ones - to younger women: check out the comments in [url=http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000321/board/flat/24875429?p=1]this thread[/url] on the IMDB message board for actor Gabriel Byrne, who is nearing 60.

Now, I'm sure there are similar cases of young guys having crushes on older women, but it seems to be rarer, much more dependent on looks [many of the above Byrne crush victims mention non-physical traits like the voice], and the crush owners seem more prone to feeling "weird" about it: for instance on the Susan Sarandon message board we see [url=http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000215/board/flat/95551568?p=1]this thread[/url], which is titled "Anybody else strangely turned on by Susan Sarandon?"

So is it "arbitrary and chauvinist social mores" at work here, or just a reflection of the evolutionary history that made "young/attractive/kind" crucial for men's feminine ideal, versus "influential/powerful/rich/commanding/not-ugly" in terms of women's preferences for men?