Getting rid of “Darwinism” 16 Jul 200818 Sep 2017 Good to see that Olivia Judson has finally caught up with me… Evolution History
Evolution Guest post for comment: sex and evolution 1 Feb 2011 The following (below the fold) has been sent to me by Tam Hunt for comment by our readers. Constructive comment, that is. Tam’s own blog is here. Read More
Epistemology Linnaeus: the founder of databases 17 Jun 200918 Sep 2017 A couple of years ago I was in Exeter, and was chatting to Staffan Müller-Wille, who is an expert in the history of biology specialising in Linnaean taxonomy. He mentioned to me that Linnaeus had invented the index card in order to keep track of the increasingly large data set… Read More
Evolution New work on the origin of life 11 Jun 2008 I can’t say much about this without reading the paper in the company of Somebody Who Knows About Chemistry, but Jack Szostak’s team at the Harvard Medical School has done some interesting looking work on the self assembly of lipids into miscelles that could contain DNA reactions. What is new… 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).