New Ecuador constitution recognizes evolution

On September 28, the people of Ecuador will vote on a new constitution and that constitution is expected to gain easy approval. The new constitution includes a five article section granting rights to nature as a whole. The section refers to nature as Pachamama, a local pagan goddess, the equivalent to Mother Earth or Mother Nature in Anglo-American idiom. Nature has the right to "integral restoration" and people of any nationality can petition the courts in the name of nature. The government Ecuador is obligated to protect nature and prevent extinction or harmful alteration of ecosystems and natural cycles.

According to Reuters, 56 percent of Ecuadorans approve of the proposed document.

Chapter: Rights for Nature

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.

In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.

Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.

The Genius of Charles Darwin

Excellent Video.

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Chris Comer's Fight vs Creationism in Texas

Only in Texas could the state science director be fired for insisting on teaching only good science.

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Standard Biological Parts

I find this site utterly amazing.

An Introduction to BioBrick™ Standard Biological Parts

BioBricks is a standard for interchangable parts, developed with a view to building biological systems in living cells. Here you'll find a brief introduction to BioBricks as well as the plasmids that contain them: A Team Experience Tutorial An Introduction to BioBricks BioBrick Part Names Part Tables An Introduction to Plasmids How to Edit and Interpret Part Features Introduction to the Abstraction Hierarchy

BioBrick™ Assembly

BioBricks have been designed to be assembled using normal cloning techniques. Find out more about the diffrent types of Assembly: Standard Assembly Parallel Assembly Automated Assembly RBS-CDS Issues BioBrick Prefix and Suffix

BioBrick™ Tools & The Registry

An overview of the Registry's computational tools and how one may go about using them as they look to design and develop parts, device and systems. Toolbox Overview Sandbox Overview Tutorial: How to add a basic BioBrick Making BioBrick DNA

At the Bench

Overview & links on how to physically assembly BioBricks How to perform a construction - A step by step tutorial detailing one method of making Biobrick assemblies Open Wetware Protocols are available for a number of biological procedures

DNA Part Repositories

Information about the 2008 Parts Kit How to send your parts to the Registry Automatic Sequencing Algorithm How to read sequence analyses How to read gel images More...

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Evolution

1. The National Center for Science Education, for instance, has an excellent resources page 
2. The NCSE has a list of statements from scientific societies, all in support of evolution.
3. National Association of Biology Teachers
4. National Academies
5. Society for the Study of Evolution.
6. UC Berkeley online tutorial, Understanding Evolution
7. PBS has an evolution site that introduces you to the basics.
8. Tree of Life project is a overview of systematics and the diversity of life on earth.
9. The Talk.Origins Archive  a place where you can ask questions and get replies to major criticisms of evolutionary theory.
10. Douglas Theobald's evidence for evolution page is a thorough overview of the many different lines of evidence that support the theory of evolution.
11. Index to Creationist Claims contains rebuttals to the most common creationist canards.
12. Also check out the blogs Aetiology, Afarensis, All-Too-Common Dissent, Ask The Scientician, The Daily Transcript, De Rerum Natura, Evolgen, Evolution 101, EvolutionBlog, Evolving Thoughts, Good Math, Bad Math, The Intersection, Living the Scientific Life, The Loom, Mike the Mad Biologist, The Questionable Authority, Recursivity, The Scientific Activist, Stranger Fruit, Thoughts from Kansas, and Thoughts in a Haystack.

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Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.
Profound change

Mostly, the patterns Lenski saw were similar in each separate population. All 12 evolved larger cells, for example, as well as faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities.

But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

"It's the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it's outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting," says Lenski.

Poll At Expelled Site Now Deleted

Do you think the theory of Intelligent Design should be taught in our education system?

Yes No 98% (419,526 votes)
Not sure What is it? 2% (8,912 votes)

On Bush, Bible, Fossils, Evolution, and Reality

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Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker

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The Discovery Institute vs Copyright

Tags: Discovery Institute copyright DMCA Dembski intellectually dishonest intelligent design creationism pepper Hamilton

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Another Response to TEA's Forced Resignation of Christien Comer

Letter from Texas University Biology Professors
Defending Biological Evolution as a Central Pillar of Modern Science Education

Kelso at Statesman.com on Comer

Speaking of evolution, the TEA should stop monkeying around

Comer, who taught science for 27 years, recently was given the boot by the agency for forwarding an e-mail that her bosses thought dumped on the theory of "intelligent design," which as best as I can figure is creationism with a fancier name. Creationism is the theory that God created the world in six days and then took Sunday off.

TEA Director of Science Forced to Resign

A Report of Texas Citizens for Science
by Steven Schafersman

November 29, 2007

True Reason for the Forced Resignation
Thus, it is easy to conclude that Chris was forced to resign because someone wanted her out of the TEA--not because she violated a formal written policy, but because she DID violate the preposterous and unethical verbal policy of neutrality to Creationism. I doubt that this policy is written anywhere, but I hope another FOIA request will reveal its official existence. Reporters should interview Associate Commissioner Susan Barnes about her September address to TEA staff. She may still have her notes available (unless she has shredded them, which has been the official TEA policy since...September). A reporter should read back to her what Monica Martinez wrote, and ask Associate Commissioner Barnes to explain why violating a policy that the TEA "must remain neutral" on--not publicizing or seeming to "endorse" a group that "opposes teaching creationism"--is the same as "you are not to communicate in writing or otherwise with anyone outside the agency in any way that might compromise the transparency and/or integrity of the upcoming TEKS development and revision process." I, for one, can't see that these are the same thing, but apparently Monica Martinez and Susan Barnes think they are.

Genomic Research

DNA Extracted From Woolly Mammoth Hair

Science Daily —

Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller of Penn State, working with Thomas
Gilbert from Copenhagen and a large international consortium,
discovered that hair shafts provide an ideal source of ancient DNA -- a
better source than bones and muscle for studying the genome sequences
of extinct animals. Their research achievement, described in a paper to
be published in the journal Science on Sept. 28, includes the
sequencing of entire mitochondrial genomes from 10 individual woolly
mammoths.

Drawing of a woolly mammoth. (Credit: Penn State University)

To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks

I do so love stories like this, it just makes sense.

"Extra gene copies are an easy way for evolution to ramp up expression of a protein," said Nathaniel Dominy, assistant professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the paper's authors. "Why wait for chance mutations to improve gene function? Natural selection can favor duplicate copies of a gene that already works well, and enzyme production will increase."

Other primates eat mainly ripe fruits containing very little starch. A new ability to supplement the diet with calorie-rich starches could have fed our large brains and opened up new food supplies that fueled our unrivaled colonization of the planet, Dominy said.

The researchers sampled saliva from 50 European-American undergraduates and found as many as 15 copies of the amylase gene per person. By comparison, all 15 chimpanzees they sampled had exactly two copies each. Students with more copies of the gene also had higher concentrations of the enzyme in their spit.
For Dominy and his coauthors, the finding goes beyond the mouth. In pondering human origins, Dominy said, anthropologists have long been stumped by the sudden, nearly simultaneous increases in our brain size, body size, and geographic range, while other apes changed little. Early humans simply must have found some source of better nutrition to make it all possible, they reasoned.

"That's the big mystery of paleoanthropology," Dominy said. "What changed? Why did our earliest human ancestors deviate from the pattern we see in living apes to evolve this incredibly large brain, which is very energetically expensive to maintain, and to become a much more efficient bipedal organism?"

For years, the answer was thought to be the growing importance of meat in the diet, as early humans learned to hunt. But, Dominy pointed out, "Even when you look at modern human hunter-gatherers, meat is a relatively small fraction of their diet. They cooperate with language, use nets; they have poisoned arrows, even, and still it's not that easy to hunt meat. To think that, two to four million years ago, a small-brained, awkwardly bipedal animal could efficiently acquire meat, even by scavenging, just doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

Some anthropologists have begun to suspect the new source of food consisted of starches, stored by plants in the form of underground tubers and bulbs--wild versions of modern-day foods like carrots, potatoes, and onions. Once early humans learned to recognize tuber-forming plants, they opened up a food source unknown to other apes.

"It's kind of a goldmine," Dominy said. "All you have to do is dig it up."

The Peppered Moth: The Proof of Darwinian Evolution

The case reached a prominence as one of the most cited examples of Darwinian evolution in action because of the visual impact of the case, the ease with which it can be understood by non-specialists, and because empirical evidence was collected, in the 1950s, to show the selective agent responsible for the changes that had been observed.

Censoring Scientific Discourse

Wordpress.com is the fourth biggest blog hosting site on the internet, and is home to more than 1 million blogs. According to the founding developer of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg, his site was doing more than 12 million pageviews a month in Turkey
-- in other words, a large, thriving citizen-journalist community has been completely cut off because of the ego of a single wealthy creationist.

Scientists Retrace Evolution With First Atomic Structure Of An Ancient Protein

The structures allowed the scientists to identify exactly how the new function evolved. They found that just seven historical mutations, when introduced into the ancestral receptor gene in the lab, recapitulated the evolution of GR's present-day response to cortisol. They were even able to deduce the order in which these changes occurred, because some mutations caused the protein to lose its function entirely if other "permissive" changes, which otherwise had a negligible effect on the protein, were not in place first.

"These permissive mutations are chance events. If they hadn't happened first, then the path to the new function could have become an evolutionary road not taken," Thornton said. "Imagine if evolution could be rewound and set in motion again: a very different set of genes, functions and processes might be the outcome."The atomic structure revealed exactly how these mutations allowed the new function to evolve. The most radical one remodeled a whole section of the protein, bringing a group of atoms close to the hormone. A second mutation in this repositioned region then created a tight new interaction with cortisol. Other earlier mutations buttressed particular parts of the protein so they could tolerate this eventual remodeling.

"We were able to walk through the evolutionary process from the distant past to the present day," said Ortlund, who is now at Emory University in Atlanta. "Until now, we've always had to look at modern proteins and just guess how they evolved."

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Email from Don McLeroy

Could there be a worst qualified school board member? Read the email below. It just gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

October 30, 2003
The Glencoe Motion

My Personal Confession

Given all the time in the world, I don't think I could make a
spider out of a rock. However, most of the books we are considering
adopting, claim that Nothing made a spider out of a rock.

I don't think I share a common ancestor with a tree. However, most
of the books we are considering adopting, claim as a fact that we all
share a common ancestor with a tree.

Discussion

Has science made its case that Nothing made a spider out of a rock
and that we share a common ancestor with a tree? I say NO, there are
too many difficulties with their case, therefore, I am making these
motions.

Evolution science is predominantly historical science; it is not
observable or testable empirically, it must be inferred. For example,
even the empirical research on embryology and the sequences of
proteins and DNA only give rise to historical speculations. Thus, the
argument for evolution is not deductive, but inductive; in an
inductive argument, scientists weigh evidence to see what is most
probable to have occurred. On this basis, most scientists hypothesize
that Nothing made a spider out of a rock and that we share a common
ancestor with a tree. However, other scientists find serious flaws
with those hypotheses.

In most of the books we are considering adopting, our students are
not being presented both sides; the minority viewpoint is being
withheld. This means that these books do not conform to our
standards.

In fact, most of the books assert the majority view as a fait
accompli. While all the books contain some "qualifiers", Glencoe's
Biology, the Dynamics of Life comes the closest to meeting Texas'
high standards and is the most "qualified" book up for adoption.

The Motions

Therefore, I plan to make the following motions at our November
board meeting.

First, I will move that we separate out the regular biology books
from the commissioner's recommendation.

Second, I will move that we adopt Glencoe's Biology, the Dynamics
of Life as conforming and adopt the rest of the regular biology books
as non-conforming.

Last Thought

This action would approve all the books up for adoption, plus
reward the book that most closely follows our standards. It does not
negatively single out any book but fulfills our responsibility of
standards conformity.

Don McLeroy

Just wrong on so many levels.

Dr. McLeroy is apparently a dentist. My advice is to avoid him if you have dental problems. Anyone who does not believe in evolution is so incompetent in biology as to not be trusted in medicine.