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rdean
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National-Academies.org | Newsroom
Understanding evolution is essential to identifying and treating disease," said Harvey Fineberg, president of IOM. "For example, the SARS virus evolved from an ancestor virus that was discovered by DNA sequencing. Learning about SARS' genetic similarities and mutations has helped scientists understand how the virus evolved. This kind of knowledge can help us anticipate and contain infections that emerge in the future."
DNA sequencing and molecular biology have provided a wealth of information about evolutionary relationships among species. As existing infectious agents evolve into new and more dangerous forms, scientists track the changes so they can detect, treat, and vaccinate to prevent the spread of disease.
Evolution not only best explains the biodiversity on Earth, it also helps scientists predict what they are likely to discover in the future.
------------------------------------------------
Science was primitive in Darwins day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwins Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term dinosaur. Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved spontaneous generation, the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things.
Charles Darwin didnt invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). Thats science.
Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasnt even Darwins idea.
But our understanding of how life works since Darwin wont swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwins genius and the fact that evolution is lifes driving force, with or without Darwin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/science/10essa.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Quantifying the Importance of Evolution
Recently a concerned parent asked NCSE for advice because her child's science teacher planned to skip the textbook chapter on evolution in order to avoid conflict with a creationist student who was very vocal about his views. Besides offering the teacher support for teaching evolution, this parent wanted to provide the teacher with solid information about how to teach evolution well, and the reasons it is important to teach evolution.
Still, for a classroom teacher who is being pressed not to teach evolution, it may be necessary to give a very concrete, practical answer to the question, "What harm is done if my child doesn't study evolution?" And the answer is, "S/he can't possibly score well on the College Board biology exams," (also known as "subject SAT tests".)
National Academy of Science in 1996 list five "Unifying Concepts and Processes" underlying all scientific disciplines:
Systems, order, and organization
Evidence, models, and explanation
Change, constancy, and measurement
Evolution and equilibrium
Form and Function
(National Academy of Science, 1996)
The proportion of the test devoted to "Population Biology" makes up 33% of a student's score, and includes questions on "Principles of evolution: History of evolutionary concepts, Lamarckian and Darwinian theories; Adaptive radiation; Major features of plant and animal evolution; Concepts of homology and analogy; Convergence, extinction, balanced polymorphism, genetic drift ; Classification of living organisms; Evolutionary history of humans." Related concepts - about Mendelian and modern genetics, for example - are included in other portions of the test. (All the foregoing quotations are excerpted from test descriptions at the College Board Online web site at
College Admissions - SAT - University & College Search Tool
-----------------------------------------------
For the purposes of this installment, it may be helpful to remember that the term microevolution generally refers to evolutionary changes taking place within populations and species , and the term macroevolution refers to the major evolutionary trends which have marked higher order splits and junctures at or above the species level and taking place over the whole long history of evolution on earth. The phenomenon of speciation (the emergence of a new species out of an ancestor species) is the focus of this installment, because it is in a sense the key "bridge" linking the kind of evolutionary changes which we can observe happening all the time within populations and the kind of qualitative splits and ruptures which mark the start of a whole new evolutionary line , such as a new Family or Order , and which begin with particular speciation events, or with rapid "bursts" of such events.
(microevolution doesn't mean germs)
The Science of Evolution (part-4) Ardea Skybreak
------------------------------------------------------
The most obvious examples of evolutionary biology's importance to medical understanding are related to infectious disease [7]. As Jon Laman (Erasmus University, The Netherlands) pointed out at the meeting, the immune system provides the perfect platform to explain the medical relevance of the exquisite evolutionary relationships between pathogens and their hosts. Understanding how virulence evolves, for example, can help predict the potential, sometimes counterintuitive (and controversial) negative consequences of imperfect vaccination [8,9]. But evolution can also tell us that the origin of HIV was precipitated by a jump across the primate species barrier [10] and enables us to predict the imminent arrival of avian flu and the mutations most likely to be responsible for that evolutionary leap from birds to humans [11]. Where epidemiological and population genetic processes occur on the same time scale, the emerging field of "phylodyamics" can also inform us about the timing and progression of pathogen adaptation more generally [12].
The relevance of evolution to medicine is, however, much broader. Participants at the York meeting discussed not only how vulnerability to cancer is an inevitable but unfortunate consequence of imperfect human engineering and natural selection (Mel Greaves, Institute of Cancer Research, UK) [Ed. note: Orac discussed Mel Greaves' recent article in Nature Reviews Cancer about this very topic while refuting Dr. Egnor.], but how life history theory can potentially explain patterns of pregnancy loss (Virginia Vitzthum, Indiana University), how a comparative approach applied to different human cultures and different primates can improve rates of breastfeeding (Helen Ball, University of Durham), whether clinical depression has an adaptive origin (Lewis Wolpert, University College London), and if suicide attempts are really just evolutionary bargaining chips in intense social disputes (Ed Hagen, Humboldt University).
Medicine and Evolution, Part 10: "Intelligent design" creationists misrepresenting the role of evolution in medicine : Respectful Insolence
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now let's look at the top 10 "scientific discoveries" we've learned from "Mystical Creation" in order of importance:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Anyone who wants to, please fill in the numbers. Because I couldn't find a single thing.
Just the fact that if we want to continue higher education in any scientific field of study, we must learn about evolution. That's the number one reason to study evolution and the related sciences.
Understanding evolution is essential to identifying and treating disease," said Harvey Fineberg, president of IOM. "For example, the SARS virus evolved from an ancestor virus that was discovered by DNA sequencing. Learning about SARS' genetic similarities and mutations has helped scientists understand how the virus evolved. This kind of knowledge can help us anticipate and contain infections that emerge in the future."
DNA sequencing and molecular biology have provided a wealth of information about evolutionary relationships among species. As existing infectious agents evolve into new and more dangerous forms, scientists track the changes so they can detect, treat, and vaccinate to prevent the spread of disease.
Evolution not only best explains the biodiversity on Earth, it also helps scientists predict what they are likely to discover in the future.
------------------------------------------------
Science was primitive in Darwins day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwins Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term dinosaur. Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved spontaneous generation, the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things.
Charles Darwin didnt invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). Thats science.
Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasnt even Darwins idea.
But our understanding of how life works since Darwin wont swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwins genius and the fact that evolution is lifes driving force, with or without Darwin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/science/10essa.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Quantifying the Importance of Evolution
Recently a concerned parent asked NCSE for advice because her child's science teacher planned to skip the textbook chapter on evolution in order to avoid conflict with a creationist student who was very vocal about his views. Besides offering the teacher support for teaching evolution, this parent wanted to provide the teacher with solid information about how to teach evolution well, and the reasons it is important to teach evolution.
Still, for a classroom teacher who is being pressed not to teach evolution, it may be necessary to give a very concrete, practical answer to the question, "What harm is done if my child doesn't study evolution?" And the answer is, "S/he can't possibly score well on the College Board biology exams," (also known as "subject SAT tests".)
National Academy of Science in 1996 list five "Unifying Concepts and Processes" underlying all scientific disciplines:
Systems, order, and organization
Evidence, models, and explanation
Change, constancy, and measurement
Evolution and equilibrium
Form and Function
(National Academy of Science, 1996)
The proportion of the test devoted to "Population Biology" makes up 33% of a student's score, and includes questions on "Principles of evolution: History of evolutionary concepts, Lamarckian and Darwinian theories; Adaptive radiation; Major features of plant and animal evolution; Concepts of homology and analogy; Convergence, extinction, balanced polymorphism, genetic drift ; Classification of living organisms; Evolutionary history of humans." Related concepts - about Mendelian and modern genetics, for example - are included in other portions of the test. (All the foregoing quotations are excerpted from test descriptions at the College Board Online web site at
College Admissions - SAT - University & College Search Tool
-----------------------------------------------
For the purposes of this installment, it may be helpful to remember that the term microevolution generally refers to evolutionary changes taking place within populations and species , and the term macroevolution refers to the major evolutionary trends which have marked higher order splits and junctures at or above the species level and taking place over the whole long history of evolution on earth. The phenomenon of speciation (the emergence of a new species out of an ancestor species) is the focus of this installment, because it is in a sense the key "bridge" linking the kind of evolutionary changes which we can observe happening all the time within populations and the kind of qualitative splits and ruptures which mark the start of a whole new evolutionary line , such as a new Family or Order , and which begin with particular speciation events, or with rapid "bursts" of such events.
(microevolution doesn't mean germs)
The Science of Evolution (part-4) Ardea Skybreak
------------------------------------------------------
The most obvious examples of evolutionary biology's importance to medical understanding are related to infectious disease [7]. As Jon Laman (Erasmus University, The Netherlands) pointed out at the meeting, the immune system provides the perfect platform to explain the medical relevance of the exquisite evolutionary relationships between pathogens and their hosts. Understanding how virulence evolves, for example, can help predict the potential, sometimes counterintuitive (and controversial) negative consequences of imperfect vaccination [8,9]. But evolution can also tell us that the origin of HIV was precipitated by a jump across the primate species barrier [10] and enables us to predict the imminent arrival of avian flu and the mutations most likely to be responsible for that evolutionary leap from birds to humans [11]. Where epidemiological and population genetic processes occur on the same time scale, the emerging field of "phylodyamics" can also inform us about the timing and progression of pathogen adaptation more generally [12].
The relevance of evolution to medicine is, however, much broader. Participants at the York meeting discussed not only how vulnerability to cancer is an inevitable but unfortunate consequence of imperfect human engineering and natural selection (Mel Greaves, Institute of Cancer Research, UK) [Ed. note: Orac discussed Mel Greaves' recent article in Nature Reviews Cancer about this very topic while refuting Dr. Egnor.], but how life history theory can potentially explain patterns of pregnancy loss (Virginia Vitzthum, Indiana University), how a comparative approach applied to different human cultures and different primates can improve rates of breastfeeding (Helen Ball, University of Durham), whether clinical depression has an adaptive origin (Lewis Wolpert, University College London), and if suicide attempts are really just evolutionary bargaining chips in intense social disputes (Ed Hagen, Humboldt University).
Medicine and Evolution, Part 10: "Intelligent design" creationists misrepresenting the role of evolution in medicine : Respectful Insolence
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now let's look at the top 10 "scientific discoveries" we've learned from "Mystical Creation" in order of importance:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Anyone who wants to, please fill in the numbers. Because I couldn't find a single thing.
Just the fact that if we want to continue higher education in any scientific field of study, we must learn about evolution. That's the number one reason to study evolution and the related sciences.
