Chance and Necessity

 
Thanks to Ryan Gregory [Blogs by Scientists], I've just added a new blog Chance and Necessity to my list of must-reads. As you might guess from the title, this blog is devoted to evolution. It's published by a "faculty member in the South"—presumably this means southern USA and not Australia or Chile.

Here are two teasers to tempt you to follow Ryan's suggestion and read Chance and Necessity. The first is Increasing neurogenesis in the adult mammalian brain ...

The conventional wisdom is that we are born with all the brain cells we’re ever going to have, and it’s all downhill from there—as we age, we lose brain cells, never to replace them. This, of course, explains why teenagers are so much smarter than their parents. Unfortunately for the conventional wisdom, it’s wrong.

The second is a posting on the debate over the significance of evo-devo; especially the claim that most morphological changes in animals are due to change in regulatory sequences and not in coding regions of protein [Incorporating evo-devo and the genetics of morphology].

Scientific controversies typically consist of vigorous exchanges of ideas with periodic injections of new data that may shape the debate. Personalities can certainly influence the path these controversies take, but the ultimate arbiter is data, not drama. In the field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) we can witness just such a lively situation, both in the literature and at meetings.

Read the comments to this posting. You'll find intelligent people discussing whether natural selection or random genetic drift accounts for morphological change. This is such a refreshing change from blogs where any challenge to adaptationist explanations is viewed as extreme heresy.

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