MetaFilter posts tagged with naturalselection and evolution

What Good Is Half A Machine?

DU — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:24:37 -0800

One of the classic arguments against evolution by natural selection is "what good is half an X?" where X is an eye, a wing or some other complex body part or system. Directly responding to the implicit challenge some researchers have been not just figuring out how X could have evolved, but actually evolving new complex machines (previously). The basic ideas are so simple that web versions (explanation and discussion) have been popping up.

Darwin, extended

digaman — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:50:28 -0800

The "blind watchmaker" may not be as blind as we thought. A team of scientists at Princeton University discovers that organisms are not only evolving, they're evolving to evolve better, using a set of proteins to "steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness" by making tiny course corrections.

Down

chuckdarwin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:08:33 -0800

The Genius of Charles Darwin Warning: Dawkins haters, click away now. And, yes: eponysterical.

Natural selection observed in a lab

Tehanu — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:36:58 -0800

In the 1980s, Richard Lenski hypothesized that his research team should be able to watch random mutations and natural selection taking place in a lab by observing a bacteria population over many generations. In 1988, beginning with a single bacterium, he started several replicate colonies. Recently, after 33,127 generations, his team has observed natural selection.

Jerry Fodor, on Why Pigs Don't Have Wings

decoherence — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:08:55 -0800

Rutgers professor of philosophy Jerry Fodor created a bit of a stir last October when he wrote an article for the London Review of Books arguing that natural selection may not be such a great theory after all, and that a "major revision of evolutionary theory... is in the offing." Not many fellow philosophers and academics agree, it seems. Fodor responds to his critics here and here. Six months later, it's still not entirely clear whether his argument is, as Justin E.H. Smith put it, "irresponsible and stupid or so subtle that none of his adversaries, defending a status quo interpretation of the theory of natural selection, have been able to get it yet."

Clock Evolution Model

Stunt — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:01:03 -0800

Natural selection and evolution in clocks(youtube) - Video of the details and results of a program written to model the evolution of clocks (if they were alive). It seems that it was done to disprove a strawman argument used to argue in favor of creationism by some (an argument I hadn't personally heard used before). Found here, and explained in more detail than I can offer.

The consequences of Charles Darwin's "one long argument"

Postroad — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 10:05:58 -0800

Intelligent Evolution ...Today we live in a less barbaric age,[than the age of Copernicus and Bruno] but an otherwise comparable disjunction between science and religion, the one born of Darwinism, still roils the public mind. Why does such intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the overwhelming accumulated evidence favoring it? The answer is simply that the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution, challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity. Evolution by natural selection, to be as concise as possible, has changed everything...

Don't fear the (bird) reaper

docgonzo — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 06:28:18 -0800

Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald, author of The evolution of infectious disease and an expert on the development of pathogen virulence (see this, this and this for a good intro), responds to this editorial in Scientific American and pours cold water on fears of pandemic influenza.