21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Evolution of Sea Turtle Migrations
Each year around Christmas time, green turtles (Chelonia mydas) leave their shallow feeding grounds along the coast of Brazil and embark upon a 2000 km journey to their nesting grounds, the beaches of Ascension Island, in the mid-Atlantic. The journey takes a little more than 2 months in both directions, and is a miracle of navigation. Biologists have long wondered how the turtles manage the feat, and also why they bother to do it at all.
Fifteen years ago two researchers, Archie Carr and Pa...Folksonomies: evolution
Folksonomies: evolution
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notesExplained by continental drift (later discredited).
08 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
The Danger of Teleological Accounts of Evolution
It's important to remember that arguments over evolutionary mechanisms often depend on the deeply held convictions of evolutionary biologists—after all, biologists are people, too! Almost everyone is reluctant to let go of deeply held convictions. Many biologists, in particular, are still attracted to teleological accounts of evolution. Teleology is the idea that all activities tend toward the achievement of some sort of goal. "Everything as to its purpose" is the undercurrent of teleology,... 1 notes
notesThe idea that evolution has a purpose and that natural selection works efficiently are erroneous.
26 APR 2012 by ideonexus
Interest in Genetics of "Lesser" Animals Betrays our Conn...
Genetics has enticed a great many explorers during the past two decades. They have labored with fruit-flies and guinea-pigs, with sweet peas and corn, with thousands of animals and plants in fact, and they have made heredity no longer a mystery but an exact science to be ranked close behind physics and chemistry in definiteness of conception. One is inclined to believe, however, that the unique magnetic attraction of genetics lies in the vision of potential good which it holds for mankind rat... 1 notes
notesIf we were not related to them, then there would be little scientific interest in exploring them.
21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Seeing How Species Arise is Similar to Understanding Star...
The way we discovered how species arise resembles the way
astronomers discovered how stars “evolve” over time. Both processes
occur too slowly for us to see them happening over our lifetime. But we
can still understand how they work by finding snapshots of the process
at different evolutionary stages and putting these snapshots together
into a conceptual movie. For stars, astronomers saw dispersed clouds
of matter (“star nurseries”) in galaxies. Elsewhere they saw those clouds condens... 1 notes
notesJust as astronomers search the skies for stars in varying stages of life, biologists look for species in varying degrees development.
03 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Competition Causes Death
Biologists have persistently overestimated the importance of physical causes of premature death rather than biological ones. In virtually any account of evolution, drought, frost, wind, or starvation looms large as the enemy of life. The great struggle, we are told, is to adapt to these conditions. Marvels of physical adaptation—the camel's hump, the polar bear's fur, the rotifer's boil-resistant tunare held to be among evolution's greatest achievements. The first ecological theories of sex... 1 notes
notesAnimals die from competition with other animals, few die of natural causes.
03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Death is Not a Law of Biology
It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable, and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists ...
3 There is no law of biology that says things have to die.
03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Number of Bits for a Set of Encyclopedias are Minuscule C...
I have estimaged how many letters there are in a the Enclyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide--which is the barest piece of dust t... 1 notes
notesFeynman estimates the number of atoms neccessary for storing a set of encyclopedias, and then compares that to the amount of data included in a DNA string.
