Tangled Bank #100, Bad Flu Edition

UPDATE: PZ Myers, in his link to this clears up a numbering error, and it turns out this is the 100th edition of Tangled Bank. Congratulation to Dr. Myers in such a long term and well run blog carnival, and thanks to all the other hosts who put time and energy to 1 through 99!

I’ve come down with a terrible flu right in time for Tangled Bank #100. This is making it quite difficult to even sit at my computer and type. Luckily, we have a volunteer to put together this issue in my absence. A famous movie star and producer and great mind of evolutionary biology. His most recent work will include the likes of Dr. Richard Dawkins and Dr. PZ Myers.

Because of various publicity concerns, he wishes to remain nameless. However, he promised that his work will be fair an unbiased, offering no cherry picking or quote mining at all. So, without further ado, Tangled Bank #99.

Our first article comes from the Archaeozoology, who offers the following discussion of how Darwin was wrong:

Charles Darwin maintained that the domesticated chicken descended from the red jungle fowl, but new research from Uppsala University now shows that the wild origins of the chicken are more complicated than that.

The Agriculture Biodiversity blog has a post discussing Darwinian Agriculture. I wonder where the Divinely Inspired Agriculture discussion is?

This is just one aspect of what Denison calls Darwinian agriculture, a fascinating approach to the whole question of just what is being selected. There is, as someone else wrote, grandeur in this view of life …

The blog Podering Pikaia offers a look at a paper discussing the navigation of bats. If they do navigate magnetically, one must wonder what these organs were good for if only half developed, sticking to people’s refrigerators?

The question of how bats navigate has been an issue of considerable speculation for some time now. The authors point out that there are two alternative hypotheses: a light dependent method, or a biological mechanism incorporating magnetism. It is notable that the only other mammals known to use magnetic navigation have lifestyles that are almost the polar (no pun intended) opposite of bats: naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) have been shown to use internal magnetite “compasses” to find their way around underground.

Dr. Martin Rundkvist offers a review of Donald Prothero’s new book Evolution, and comes off squarely on the side of evolution, completely without mention even a single piece of evidence for intelligent design.

But it’s not just a book about evolutionary zoology. It’s also a salvo in a war that’s being fought on that far-off continent, Northern America.

Living the Scientific Life also offers a review of this book, writing

I was in love with dinosaurs when I was a kid, and I still am. It was my love for dinosaurs and fossils and especially my time spent learning the minutea of the evolutionary history of horses that quickly brought me into direct conflict with the church that I was being inculcated into when I was very young and innocent. Subsequently, I had to learn about evolution in small niblets on the sly. But I wish I had been able to read paleontologist Don Prothero’s beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book

coming from the Physics arXiv blog is an article on plankton blooms. Showing just one of the wholes in science it reads

Massive plankton blooms are the plague of the oceans. They starve local species by exhausting an ocean of its food and oxygen, they turn vast areas of sea to the colour of milk and have a profound effect on the ocean food web.

But where do they come from? Nobody knows.

The Highlight Health blog seeks to show how the media has been misinterpreting a recent study on fast food consumption. Not much to say about that, except that it’s probably Darwin’s fault.

A recent study evaluating the effects of fast-food-based overeating on liver enzymes and liver triglyceride content has been making the news this week. However, most media sources have been incorrectly interpreting the results. The Swedish study, published in the British Medical Association journal Gut, suggests that eating too much fast food can cause liver damage [1].

Over at 10,000 Birds, there is a discussion of just how an evolutionary view of the world’s animals can make life hard for bird watchers.

hat’s cleared that up then? No way, my friends, that’s just the beginning. Defining what “lumping and splitting” is all about may be relatively simple, but defining what a species is – which you need to do first to justify how they can then be lumped or split – has to be one of biology’s thorniest problems. There are many complex arguments raging about what a species is and amongst biologists themselves there are several different schools of thought. Generally though a species is considered to be a distinct and visually recognizable life-form that can be separated from other similar life-forms due to obvious physical and genetic differences, and which generally does not interbreed with other species.

The doctor is in at WhiteCoat Underground, offering a discussion of a new intelligent design journal. From the first few sentences it is easy to be quite happy with the future of Intelligent Design.

So, Answers in Genesis cranked out the first issue of its new journal, and with all deliberate speed! It’s remarkable. I’m guessing that creation research doesn’t take quite as long as, say, real science.

Back at Aardvarchaeology, Dr. Martin offers an article on vulgar scientism and archaeology.

In Swedish and many other languages, the word for science doesn’t denote the natural variety in the same way as in English. There’s no terminological distinction between a scientist and a scholar. We’re all doing vetenskap, Wissenschaft, science. Yet among Anglophone archaeologists of an aggressively humanistic stripe, there used to be (and still to some extent is) hostility towards “scientism”, often compounded to “naïve scientism” or “vulgar scientism”.

I will once again use the words of PZ Myers without consent, in his discussion of the question “what is evolution?”

Go ahead, you people try to answer it in one sentence in the comments. It’s harder than it looks, especially since I feel the itch to expand each word into a lecture.

Podblack Cat offers up the third in a series on skeptical books for children, aimed at parents and other adults who wish to influence kids away from the possibility of accepting ideas like intelligent design.

Let’s face it, when you go to a bookstore, you’re more likely to be faced with the following teenage -target audience selection that I photographed here – lots and lots of female-orientated fiction that does not seem to particularly promote a pro-science message.

So that’s it for this issue of the tangled bank, remember to turn up again next time on March 19th for the 100th edition, at Tangled Up in Blue Guy. And if you have a story for the next issue, please feel free to send it to host@tangledbank.net.
Editorial Note, I am not a cdesign proponentist, the presence of Ben Stein was obviously false. All blogs posted above are perfectly scientific. I apologize to those who I picked questionable quotes from, and hope everyone will actually pop over to read them to get the full stories.

Update: I came across one entry I had missed, Greg Laden’s blog has an article up on the Lemur Family tree.

A DNA phylogeny based on over 200 species of lemurs and related species is now available.

Lemurs are part of the large group known as the strepsirrhine primates (yes, three r’s…)