Category: Science

John Derbyshire will be on Brian Lamb’s Q&A program this Friday morning, 9-10 Eastern. He’s a conservative who doesn’t buy the Intelligent Design nonsense.

Intelligent Design creationist Michael Behe has an op-ed in today’s New York Times arguing in favor of ID; The Panda’s Thumb has a couple postings ripping it apart, and the religious blogs have some hailing it. I don’t have time for comment on this today, but it’s worth wading into for anyone with a few hours to spare.

It should be noted that ID isn’t only bad science, rejected by virtually all of the world’s biologists, it’s also bad religion that’s rejected by all the world’s honest religious people; see The Revealer for another cogent critique of Behe’s column:

Michael J. Behe, a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, pleads the case of Intelligent Design in The New York Times, explaining I.D.’s “four linked claims,” and disingenuously describing the first two controversial assumptions as “uncontroversial.” It’s an exercise in anachronism, pointing mechanical metaphors backwards towards biology to prove that “life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.”

BTW, I had the opportunity to argue ID with a fellow who works at the Discovery Institute during a recent foray to Seattle, and I have to say I wasn’t impressed by his honesty. But more on that later as well.

This from New Scientist highlights a fascinating finding about coral:

When the temperature soars, coral reefs might cool off by creating their own clouds.

Research from the Great Barrier Reef off the Australian coast shows that corals are packed full of the chemical dimethyl sulphide, or DMS. When released into the atmosphere, DMS helps clouds to form, which could have a large impact on the local climate.

In the air, DMS is transformed into an aerosol of tiny particles on which water vapour can condense to form clouds. This sulphur compound is also produced in large amounts by marine algae and gives the ocean its distinctive smell. Algae play a vital part in regulating Earth’s climate, but no one had looked at whether coral reefs might have a similar role.

Graham Jones of the Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, and colleagues measured DMS concentrations in corals in the Great Barrier Reef and its surrounding water. They found that the mucus exuded by the coral contained the highest concentrations of DMS so far recorded from any organism. A layer rich in DMS formed at the sea surface above the reef, where it was picked up by the wind.

“Although globally the emission of DMS from the Great Barrier Reef is not huge, on a regional basis it is very significant,” says Jones.

It’s certainly true that corals under stress produce a thicker mucous coat than they do normally, and the same applies to other reef-dwelling cnidarians such as anemones. It’s off that nobody noticed this before, because it’s common knowledge to home reef-keepers.

Incidentally, the coral reef came about historically during the Cambrian period, and it’s one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Next time you find a creationist carrying on about the impossibility of the Cambrian Explosion you can point to two Cambrian things that lead to a big take-off in evolution: sexual reproduction and the coral reef.

Sadly, the great Ernst Mayr has passed away at the age of 100:

He was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis, an intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born. The synthesis, which has been described by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard as “one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements in our century,” revived Darwin’s theories of evolution and reconciled them with new findings in laboratory genetics and in field work on animal populations and diversity.

One of Dr. Mayr’s most significant contributions was his persuasive argument for the role of geography in the origin of new species, an idea that has won virtually universal acceptance among evolutionary theorists. He also established a philosophy of biology and founded the field of the history of biology.

Truly one of the great figures in science, Mayr explained macroevolution through his theories of allopatric and peripatric speciation:

Today allopatric speciation (allo, from the Greek for other, and patric, from the Greek for fatherland) is accepted as the most common way in which new species arise: when populations of a single species are geographically isolated from one another, they slowly accumulate differences until they can no longer interbreed. It was Dr. Mayr who first convinced evolutionary biologists of the importance of allopatric speciation with the detailed arguments in his seminal book “Systematics and the Origin of Species.”

He was the principal thorn in the side of the Discovery Institute creationists.

We interrupt our program of rank political partisanship to bring you a flash of scientific insight on the development of human language:

How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel’s Negev Desert.

The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects.

Al-Sayyid is an interesting community because it has so many deaf people – 150 out of 3500 – that everybody can sign, and the sign language they’ve developed isn’t like any other sign langugage in the world or like their spoken language. How this happened remains a mystery.

Edge’s annual question is: “What do you believe even though you cannot prove it?” Here’s my favorite answer:

DONALD I. WILLIAMSON
Biologist, University of Liverpool; Author, The Origins of Larvae

I believe I can explain the Cambrian explosion.

The Cambrian explosion refers to the first appearance in a relatively short space of geological time of a very wide assortment of animals more than 500 million years ago. I believe it came about through hybridization.
Continue reading “Edge Annual Question”

Speaking of meltdowns, Arctic ice has been melting like crazy for the past 250 years or so, since the end of the Little Ice Age that peaked in 1650. National Geographic has the scoop on how far this recession has come:

To put this in perspective, when European explorers first sailed along the Alaska coastline in the 1790s, they noted only a small embayment along the coastline. By the 1880s the glacier that filled what became known as Glacier Bay had retreated, leaving a bay that extended nearly 40 miles (64 kilometers). The glacier has continued to retreat and today Glacier Bay extends more than 60 miles (96 kilometers) into the Alaskan coastline.

What complicates the human-induced global warming question is the fact that some of the glaciers in Alaska began their retreat more than 250 years ago, before the human population expanded and the industrial revolution. Some of Alaska’s glaciers began their retreat only in the last 25 years.

“The popular perception of global warming is that the entire Earth is warming everywhere. The record doesn’t show that,” said Molnia. Alaska’s temperature changes are far more dramatic than in other regions of the world, and the retreat of Alaska’s glaciers is quite significant, concludes Molnia. But there are many regions that show very little temperature change or none at all, and not all the glaciers in the world are melting.

Dan Rather’s impact on this isn’t at all clear.

Morons like Howard Dean maintain that the New York terror alert is a big fake, but baseball fans can attest that it’s real after a band of armed terrorists descended on Yankee Stadium with a vengeance:

The A’s scored three runs on five hits in the fourth. They scored four runs on three hits, a walk and an error by Rodriguez while chasing Lieber in the fifth. Melhuse made it 11-4 with his homer, off Tanyon Sturtze in the seventh, and Hatteberg’s three-run shot off Felix Heredia in the eighth capped the scoring.

It seems to me that the post-season curse won’t be a factor this year.

Here’s Pinky the Cat from the Leno show, with never-before-seen footage.

Democratic Party leader Barbra Streisand finally paid $155,000 in legal fees she owed Ken Adelman in the coast photos case. Adelman is the fellow who has the web site with aerial photos of the California coastline so he can fight erosion, and Streisand didn’t want her mansion included, being the home of a great enviroinmental activist and all.

Justice was done and the coastline has been protected from here, so all is right. See the check here.