Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I guess I’ve banged on about epigenetics for quite a few years here, and if there’s any lesson you should have learned, it’s that while epigenetics is of vital importance during the development of an organism, it’s vastly overrated as a cause of “intergenerational inheritance”. What mean by “epigenesis” or “epigenetics” is the attachment of … Continue reading A good piece by Razib Khan on epigenetics
Scientific American, once a respectable publication but now a woke joke of a rag, recently put out special edition highlighting the top science stories of 2022. (Click on cover to read.) I will make no comment except to say that the “epigenetics” article has none of the caveats about epigenetics in the nice piece by … Continue reading The best “science” stories of the year from Scientific American
I’ll continue on with New Scientist‘s 13-section claim that the modern theory of evolution needs a reboot (see previous posts here and here), though I don’t know how much longer I can stand their uninformed palaver written by incurious journalists. Today we’l take up section 4: “There is more to inheritance than just genes”, which … Continue reading The intellectual vacuity of New Scientist’s evolution issue: 3. The supposed importance of epigenetics in evolution
Denis Noble (born 1936) is a British physiologist highly regarded for his work in that field (he has an FRS). Wikipedia notes his accomplishments: He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. What the article doesn’t discuss is that Noble has spent the last period … Continue reading Denis Noble goes after Darwinian evolution again, scores own goal
I know everyone’s been asking, “Where has Deepak Chopra gone?” I haven’t seen any shenanigans from him in a while—at least not since he was deplatformed by the College of Emergency Physicians 2½ years ago, with the group realizing too late that they’d invited a Woomeister to give a keynote speech. (They disinvited him.) But … Continue reading What has Deepak Chopra been up to?
Over at The Conversation site, I’ve posted a response (“Letter 7”) to New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik in our continuing debate about the question posted by the title below (click on screenshot). This is my last response, as I started the sequence and each of us gets four “letters”. In his last letter (“Letter 6”), … Continue reading The conversation with Adam Gopnik continues
Yesterday I posted a long critique of a misguided article from the Guardian arguing that the modern theory of evolution is obsolete and needs to be replaced. One of my comments is that the article seemed say that the claim that evolution needs to be expanded by incorporating phenomena like epigenetics, niche construction, and plasticity … Continue reading Pinker: The “evolution war” is also a culture war
Here’s a video about a woman who cloned her Ragdoll cat Chai, but she didn’t get anything near a replica of the original. She says “they couldn’t be any more different”, but that’s not true. They are fairly similar but not nearly as identical as identical twins. The cloning process can change gene expression, the … Continue reading Caturday felid trifecta: A cloned cat; cats get unwanted affection; cats race to their food bowls; and lagniappe
