Getting rid of “Darwinism” 16 Jul 200818 Sep 2017 Good to see that Olivia Judson has finally caught up with me… Evolution History
Evolution Darwin’s motivation 5 Dec 2010 For some time now I have been convinced that Darwin’s original and most pressing problem was not adaptation. It was the existence of taxonomic diversity. I have thought that the debates over what was a natural classification amongst the unjustly derided Quinarians William Sharp Macleay and William Swainson were the… Read More
Accommodationism Accommodating Science overview 13 Mar 2014 I have done quite a lot of blogging under this heading lately so I thought it might be useful to get all the posts used in order: On beliefs Why do believers believe silly things? The function of denialism Why do believers believe THOSE silly things? The “developmental hypothesis” of… Read More
Evolution Virgin births 4 Dec 2007 Forget about the season; virgin births can happen any time of year… and anywhere. So there is an Ask a Scienceblogger question about virgin births. In zoology this is called “parthenogenesis” (which means “virgin birth”), and in botany it is either called “vegetative reproduction” (think: cuttings) or “apomixis”, in which… Read More
I disagree that the problem with the “-ism” is that it suggests a finality to Darwins arguments,that he was the “beginning and end of evolutionary biology”. The term is not one usually used by scientists,its being propagated by Creationists,the DI and their ilk,and just represents their particular Goebbels-esque tendency to create “isms” to devalue certain theories by turning them into an -ism,Darwinist,Evulutionist etc…..
I disagree that the problem with the “-ism” is that it suggests a finality to Darwins arguments,that he was the “beginning and end of evolutionary biology”. The term is not one usually used by scientists,its being propagated by Creationists,the DI and their ilk,and just represents their particular Goebbels-esque tendency to create “isms” to devalue certain theories by turning them into an -ism,Darwinist,Evulutionist etc…..
Ulrich Kutschera of the University of Kassel has suggested introducing the term “Darwin-Wallace principle of natural selection” (Nature 453:27, 2008).
Ulrich Kutschera of the University of Kassel has suggested introducing the term “Darwin-Wallace principle of natural selection” (Nature 453:27, 2008).
What’s that line from E. B. White? Something like “She dove into the sea of her sentence, and finally emerged, panting, on the other side, with her verb in her teeth.” (He probably used fewer commas. :))
Let’s see: Der Darwinische-WallaceischeSatzdernatuerlicheAuslese… How do Germans breathe, anyway? Durch ihren Arschloch natuerlich!
Let’s see: Der Darwinische-WallaceischeSatzdernatuerlicheAuslese… How do Germans breathe, anyway? Durch ihren Arschloch natuerlich!
What’s that line from E. B. White? Something like “She dove into the sea of her sentence, and finally emerged, panting, on the other side, with her verb in her teeth.” For values of E. B. White that equal S. L. Clemens, anyway. “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
Units are often called for names of discoverers: Ohms, Volts, Newtons, Einsteins, etc. Does anyone use the evolutionary unit, the Darwin? A Darwin is a 1% change in the gene pool of a population over one generation.
According to Wikipedia a darwin is an e-fold amount of change over one million years, and was devised by J. B. S. Haldane. I think it is flawed because it assumes that rates of change are commensurable across the evolutionary tree in absolute terms, and this is a mistake.
“Does anyone use the evolutionary unit, the Darwin? A Darwin is a 1% change in the gene pool of a population over one generation. I think they should refer to a kilodarwin as a “gould”. (Incidentally, there seem to be different definitions of what a darwin is floating around, or are they equivalent and I just not understanding? (very, very possible).
“Does anyone use the evolutionary unit, the Darwin? A Darwin is a 1% change in the gene pool of a population over one generation. I think they should refer to a kilodarwin as a “gould”. (Incidentally, there seem to be different definitions of what a darwin is floating around, or are they equivalent and I just not understanding? (very, very possible).
“Does anyone use the evolutionary unit, the Darwin? A Darwin is a 1% change in the gene pool of a population over one generation. I think they should refer to a kilodarwin as a “gould”. (Incidentally, there seem to be different definitions of what a darwin is floating around, or are they equivalent and I just not understanding? (very, very possible).