Picky Female Frogs Drive Evolution

Picky Female Frogs Drive Evolution of New Species in Less Than 8,000 Years
(UC Berkeley News)

The yet-to-be-named species arose after two isolated populations of the green-eyed tree frog reestablished contact less than 8,000 years ago and found that their hybrid offspring were less viable. To avoid hybridizing with the wrong frogs and ensure healthy offspring, one group of females preferentially chose mates from their own lineage. Over several thousand years, this behavior created a reproductively isolated population—essentially a new species—that is unable to mate with either of the original frog populations.

Things were purportedly easier (and faster) when these amphibians could turn into bipedal mammals on contact with human saliva, but that’s just another fanciful, discredited tale of divine intervention.

Biology Teachers: As Low As Lab Rats?

Biology Teachers: As Low As Lab Rats?
(Kansas City Star)

In the magazine’s third annual take on the 10 worst jobs in science, those trying to teach evolution in Kansas classrooms come in at No. 3 on the list, topped only by “human lab rat” test subjects dosed with pesticides and manure inspectors.

The Brontosaurus

The Brontosaurus
Monty Python’s flying creationism.
William Saletan (Slate)

Can ID make testable predictions? Not really. If we posit that a given biological system was designed, Rothschild asks, what can we infer about the designer’s abilities? Just “that the designer had the ability to make the design that is under consideration,” says Behe. “Beyond that, we would be extrapolating beyond the evidence.” Does Behe not understand that extrapolating beyond initial evidence is exactly the job of a hypothesis? Does he not grasp the meaninglessness of saying a designer designed things that were designed?

No more meaningless than saying natural selection selected things that were selected? Not so fast.

Related: A review of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box by the only practicing empiricist in the design/evolution playoff and the leading theorist of evolutions on the internets.

Moral Courage

Moral Courage
Stephen Metcalf (Slate)

By the rules of our language game, however, the motives of people who distrust (or, frankly, revile) The Bell Curve are instantly suspect, while the motives of people who spend their entire professional lives trying to prove black people are dumber than white people escape all scrutiny. Said researchers often refer to themselves as “race realists,” and, in addition to the Orwellian moniker, they have mastered a host of rhetorical maneuvers meant to clear themselves of the charge of out-and-out racism: They carefully insist that East Asians are smarter even than whites; that estimating any individual’s intelligence by noting his race is impossible; and above all, that the data are the data no matter where they lead, even if into the frenzy of a politically correct backlash.

Earlier: The Inequality Taboo

Exposed: TV’s bogus ‘psychics’

Exposed: TV’s bogus ‘psychics’
(Mail on Sunday)

When The Mail on Sunday put a series of scenarios to Psychic Interactive that were all entirely made up, its psychics were happy to give elaborate responses to each one.

There must be some real pranksters in the spirit world.

Education, Weight Seen To Affect Women's Sex Life

Education, Weight Seen To Affect Women's Sex Life
(Globe and Mail)

Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, university-educated women are more apt to have low sex drives—48 per cent compared to 31 per cent among high-school graduates. They are also less likely to have orgasms during intercourse.

“It may well be that highly educated women are different from less-educated women in many respects. Maybe they have higher standards … higher expectations and legitimately lower evaluations. They may be living much busier, much more stressful lives,” said William Fisher, a professor of psychology and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Western Ontario who is a co-author of the paper.

He’s just projecting.

God Save the Heretic

God Save the Heretic
(Times Online)

The difficulty, at least for the scientifically educated but spiritually malnourished, is not the idea of religion itself, meaning some system of ritualized worship that helps us to make sense, if only symbolically, of the human, natural and supernatural worlds. The difficulty is rather that all the religions on offer are so patently preposterous, if not downright unpleasant.

This piece, unlike an earlier one, doesn’t leave out Hindus or Buddhists.