Comment #5694

Posted by Frank J on July 26, 2004 05:29 PM (e) (s)

As I often say, it is impossible to know what a person truly believes, so I almost never use the word “liar” when it comes to anti-evolutionists. But if, after the email exchange, you are still undecided whether Meyer is “utterly ignorant” or “something else,” this may help:

http://reason.com/9707/fe.bailey.shtml…

Bailey makes a good case that professional evolution misrepresenters (my term) most likely accept evolution in private.

Comment #5702

Posted by rick pietz on July 26, 2004 11:07 PM (e) (s)

I am not commenting on your post, per se, but I would like to ask two questions that I think are related.  I’m sure I could do the research to find the answer, but I think you may have it at your finger tips.

1.  At what point did gender come into being, and am I right in thinking that it a ‘hermaphroditic’ stage preceded sexual differentiation, or was it merely a move from asexual reproduction?

2.  The old chicken/egg question - do we have a fossil record that indicates when egg laying began, and is there any species in existence today, that might might be representative of a presumably transitional state? 

It’s obvious that both occurred.  There had to be a ‘first’ species with two sexes, and a ‘first’ species to lay eggs, and I was curious when it occurred, and to what level of detail we can pin- point the events/transitions.

Comment #5708

Posted by Bill Humphries on July 27, 2004 02:52 AM (e) (s)

Rick, read The Red Queen for a good introduction to those questions, also see a summary from the PBS site.

Comment #5747

Posted by Bill Humphries on July 27, 2004 02:45 PM (e) (s)

Rick, read The Red Queen for a good introduction to those questions, also see a summary from the PBS site.

Comment #5749

Posted by Ian Menzies on July 27, 2004 03:20 PM (e) (s)

Wow, a 12 hour double post.  That’s impressive.

Comment #5753

Posted by alkali on July 27, 2004 04:30 PM (e) (s)

I like Smith & Szathmary’s “The Major Transitions In Evolution,” which they rewrote for a popular audience as “The Origin Of Life.”  It blasts through all the really hard questions in evolution, explaining both what’s known, what’s not known and what the alternative hypotheses are.

Comment #5760

Posted by Reed A. Cartwright on July 27, 2004 06:09 PM (e) (s)

Actually that is Maynard Smith, not Smith.

Comment #5761

Posted by Glenn Branch on July 27, 2004 06:34 PM (e) (s)

And it’s Szathmáry, not Szathmary.

Comment #5799

Posted by Dan Davidovich on July 29, 2004 07:46 AM (e) (s)

Here’s a great takedown of S.J. Gould, written by a firm believer in evolution:

http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm…

Comment #5800

Posted by Dan Davidovich on July 29, 2004 07:52 AM (e) (s)

Here’s a great takedown of S.J. Gould, written by a firm believer in evolution:

http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm…

Comment #5801

Posted by Dan Davidovich on July 29, 2004 08:03 AM (e) (s)

Here’s a great takedown of S.J. Gould, written by a firm believer in evolution:

http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm…

Comment #5802

Posted by Dan Davidovich on July 29, 2004 08:09 AM (e) (s)

Here’s a great takedown of S.J. Gould, written by a firm believer in evolution:

http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm…

Comment #5803

Posted by steve on July 29, 2004 09:13 AM (e) (s)

Wright is not a biologist, he’s a writer. To be a takedown, the subject has to be taken down. As this selection from New York Metro indicates, that is not the case:

“I read the article,” says Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a longtime ally of Gould’s. “I thought it was dumb.” Other evolutionists, even those who’ve been critical of Gould in the past, expressed shock at what they saw as Wright’s disingenuousness. “No one has explained evolution to the public better than Gould,” says Berkeley’s Padian. “It strikes me as really tragic that The New Yorker, of all publications, would devote that much space to character assassination.”

…Gould can take comfort in the fact that even some of Wright’s allies are wincing at the New Yorker attack and Nonzero’s wackier claims — among them the imminent emergence of a global “superbrain,” facilitated by the Internet and global media, as the next step in cultural and biological evolution.

Comment #5814

Posted by Gav on July 29, 2004 06:43 PM (e) (s)

Never understood the animosity of many biologists towards Gould (other than those he may have personally offended). The man was a great populiser of real science, on a par with Huxley and Feynman, and a better essayist than either. His popular writing was always entertaining [ok maybe not the structures of ET tome], thought-provoking and occasionally inspirational. Even when shooting a line his feet seemed pretty firmly on the ground [as with Hallicigenia in “Wonderful Life” . The book itself was a timely reminder, in the late 1990s, of the crucial role of opportunity, contingency, luck, in success. Not a welcome message for some.

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