Darwin yay!
Sep. 26th, 2005 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tikistitchOur newest scientific crush, P.Z. Myers, linked to this excellent Washington Post article on evolution.
Fave quote:
There's actually several other criteria that make Science all scientific 'n stuff. Our least favorite is subjecting everything we do to criticism from bajillions of other cranky scientists. It means every day, we have to subject every line of code we write to endless scrutiny from the cranky (if adorable) M.D.'s on our team, and then ultimately, we have to subject the lovely papers we've written to ill-tempered feedback from cranky (just plain cranky) journal editors.
But prediction is a very cool aspect of good theories.
The article also quotes Sean Carroll, who wrote our current bus book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which is all about EvoDevo. The books's prolly a bit of rough going if you didn't pay attention during college biology, but make your way through it, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how it is that something as weird and random as evolution could actually happen, given what we currently know about fossils and DNA.
Fave quote:
"What makes evolution a scientific explanation is that it makes testable predictions," Lander said. "You only believe theories when they make non-obvious predictions that are confirmed by scientific evidence."
There's actually several other criteria that make Science all scientific 'n stuff. Our least favorite is subjecting everything we do to criticism from bajillions of other cranky scientists. It means every day, we have to subject every line of code we write to endless scrutiny from the cranky (if adorable) M.D.'s on our team, and then ultimately, we have to subject the lovely papers we've written to ill-tempered feedback from cranky (just plain cranky) journal editors.
But prediction is a very cool aspect of good theories.
The article also quotes Sean Carroll, who wrote our current bus book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which is all about EvoDevo. The books's prolly a bit of rough going if you didn't pay attention during college biology, but make your way through it, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how it is that something as weird and random as evolution could actually happen, given what we currently know about fossils and DNA.
