Pharyngula::Compliments to the Panda's Thumb

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Monday, November 28, 2005

Compliments to the Panda's Thumb

PZ Myers • 6 Comments

The latest issue of Science (volume 310, number 5752) says some nice things about the Panda's Thumb in their Netwatch section:

WEB LOGS: THE DARWIN BRIGADE
Darwin's contemporaries Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker championed his theory in print and in lectures. If they were alive today and had a little attitude, they might craft something like The Panda's Thumb, a Web log in which a cadre of Darwin's modern-day defenders pummels antievolution pseudoscience such as "intelligent design" (ID). The site gets its name from a Stephen Jay Gould essay about the giant panda's adaptation for stripping bamboo leaves--it's a jury-rigged feature a clever designer wouldn't engineer. Panda's Thumb regulars--who range from Ph.D.s and grad students to a businessman and a lawyer--comb the news media for follies to expose and errors to correct. The site provided blanket coverage of the recent trial on the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board's decision to require teaching of ID (Science, 18 November, p. 1105). Panda's Thumb also highlights evolution-related research, such as a study showing that the antibiotics produced by our immune systems may not be a panacea for drug-resistant bacteria.

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Comments:

Trackback: Olduvai George Tracked on: Creek Running North (65.58.240.229) at 2005 11 29 00:38:49
Tuesday is my friend Carl Dennis Buell's 60th birthday. So how come he's giving us a present? Carl has been illustrating and illuminating the natural world for some decades: I think I first saw his work twenty years ago. He...

#51079: — 11/29 at 08:35 AM

The site gets its name from a Stephen Jay Gould essay about the giant panda's adaptation for stripping bamboo leaves--it's a jury-rigged feature a clever designer wouldn't engineer.

Is this true? That sounds like a bad attitude to me. You can say ID is implausible because we can explain evolution this other way. Here is the evidence. You can say ID is unscientific and give excellent reasons. But you can't say it's bad because "A clever designer wouldn't do it this way". That is just wrong. It's the epitome of hubris to have this attitude. It’s fun. But you know the saying about pride before the fall. You’ll have people hoping for your fall. That’s not what you want.

#51102: — 11/29 at 10:20 AM
That's it, one paragraph of text? And the only names mentioned - Gould, Huxley and Hooker - are not even regular contributors, lately. Salvador Cordova got more text than that in Nature, and his picture too!

#51106: — 11/29 at 10:42 AM
NatureSelectedMe:

Better get ahold of the essay, it should be in your local bookstore (the collection by Gould has this title), and is, in my recreational reading as a biology major in the early 1980s, what cemented my interest in evolution (and an excellent class in population biology).

A bone in the hand, other than those making up the thumb (the evolutionary pathway common to man, the sine qua non of creation--the designed animal according to Genesis), was modified to allow the use by the Panda.

In part, what Gould originally was getting at was the Whiggish history that affected understanding of evolutionary process, essentially looking backwards into phylogeny, with the current modifications the most advanced, and singularly important; rather than looking forward from the precursors--that this modification of the Panda hand was just as evolutionarily appropriate as primates evolving the opposible thumb. If I remember properly, even Darwin was subject to this conventional thinking in regards to the human lung.

Mike

#51112: — 11/29 at 10:50 AM
Thanks Mike. I read it a long time ago, I just didn't remember it having that argument in it. Yes, I'll have to find it again.

#51117: — 11/29 at 11:06 AM

#51112: NatureSelectedMe — 11/29 at 10:50 AM
Thanks Mike. I read it a long time ago, I just didn't remember it having that argument in it. Yes, I'll have to find it again.

stephenjaygould.org

The Panda's Peculiar Thumb

#51121: — 11/29 at 11:30 AM
Thanks for the links. Some light lunchtime reading.

The second link gets broken by the posting software. There should be an apostrophe before the s in pandas. It keeps getting stripped off.

Trackback: Science blogs getting noticed by the big guns Tracked on: Aetiology (72.9.234.70) at 2005 12 01 02:59:38
PZ noted that Science magazine contained a blurb about Panda's Thumb in this post. Today, Nature gets into the game, featuring quotes from PZ as well as Revere from Effect Measure:

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Monday, November 28, 2005

Compliments to the Panda's Thumb

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