Darwin shouldn’t be hijacked by New Atheists - he is an ethical inspiration
By Madeleine Bunting (THE GUARDIAN, 29/12/08):
Next year there will be no escaping one man and his legacy - 2009 will be marked by television series, books, debates, conferences and exhibitions devoted to Charles Darwin and his two anniversaries: the 200th of his birth; and the 150th of his book, On the Origin of the Species. One might imagine that there was little more to be written on the man, but the coming year will bring the publication of plenty more books, starting this week with a helpful Rough Guide to Evolution - Darwin’s big idea that changed the world - and in 12…
El evolucionismo y sus ramificaciones: ciencia y religión
Por Juan A. Herrero Brasas, profesor de Etica Social en la Universidad del Estado de California (EL MUNDO, 26/12/08):
En el año que ahora termina se cumple el 150 aniversario de la publicación de El Origen de las especies, obra sobre la que Charles Darwin sustentó su teoría de la evolución. La extraordinaria influencia que dicha teoría ha ejercido en la sociedad occidental a lo largo de más de un siglo es algo que tan sólo en la actualidad estamos empezando a vislumbrar en sus auténticas dimensiones.
La teoría de la evolución de Darwin, como es sabido, no surgió en un vacío…
On history’s naughty step
By Kathryn Hughes (THE GUARDIAN, 18/09/08):
Used clumsily, historical hindsight can be a blunt and savage thing. Just last week, the birth control pioneer Marie Stopes was denounced as an evil eugenicist. Far from being a “woman of distinction” who deserves her face on a commemorative stamp, some commentators have played up the fact that she advocated compulsory sterilisation for anyone she deemed “totally unfit for parenthood”. Even worse, in the 1930s, Stopes apparently sent some of her swoony poetry to Hitler. At a single stroke, the public servant who liberated middle- and working-class women from an endless round of unwanted childbearing…
Félix de Azara, Wallace y Darwin
Por Santiago Grisolía, bioquímico (ABC, 03/07/08):
EL pasado 19 de junio, con motivo de la entrega de los Premios Mariano de Cavia, Luca de Tena y Mingote, que da este periódico, tuve la suerte de charlar con Mónica Fernández-Aceytuno y a través de ella me enteré, y debía estar avergonzado por no haberlo sabido antes, del importante papel que tuvo el español Félix de Azara en la evolución de las ideas de Darwin.
Hace ahora 150 años, en junio de 1858, Darwin recibió una carta de Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalista que trabajaba en la lejana Malasia, en la que exponía sus ideas…
Survival of the wisest
By Johnjoe McFadden, professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey (THE GUARDIAN, 30/06/08):
One hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow, a small group of scientists at a meeting on the north side of Piccadilly heard the first public account of the theory that the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls the single best idea that anyone has ever had.
The reading was precipitated by an event many thousands of miles away on the island of Ternate (now in Indonesia). The young explorer Alfred Russell Wallace had spent a decade travelling the globe amassing a collection of more than 100,000 specimens of plants…
¿Desciende el hombre del mono?
Por Manuel Soler, catedrático de Biología Animal de la Universidad de Granada y presidente de la Sociedad Española de Biología Evolutiva (EL PAÍS, 23/02/08):
Durante el mes de enero se organizó en España un ciclo de conferencias que, bajo el título Lo que Darwin no sabía, se ha constituido en la primera gran ofensiva iniciada por los grupos religiosos ultraconservadores estadounidenses que pretenden, mediante la crítica de la Teoría Evolutiva, extender la idea de que el Creacionismo (en los últimos tiempos denominado Diseño Inteligente, DI) puede considerarse una teoría científica. Las “conferencias” no son tales, y mucho menos científicas; son actos propagandísticos…
La huella de la historia en nuestro genoma
Por David Comas, profesor agregado de Biología en la UPF (LA VANGUARDIA, 02/12/07):
El brillo de las estrellas que observamos en una noche despejada es resultado de emisiones de luz que tuvieron lugar en astros lejanos en un pasado muy remoto, e incluso algunos de los brillos que contemplamos actualmente pertenecen a estrellas ya extintas. De manera similar, los genes que portamos son el rastro heredado de antepasados que pertenecían a poblaciones que ya no existen. Alo largo de la vida, nuestro genoma va acumulando pequeñas diferencias, pequeños cambios. Algunas de estas mutaciones son responsables de nuestro envejecimiento y quizás del…
What I Think About Evolution
By Sam Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 31/05/07):
IN our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they did not “believe” in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and with the seriousness it…
Sin nexo con el ‘Homo sapiens’
Por Robert Sala Ramos, profesor de Prehistoria, URV (LA VANGUARDIA, 24/12/06):
Los neandertales fueron la única línea humana típica de Europa: los verdaderos europeos. Aparecieron a partir de la evolución del Homo heidelbergensis hace 250.000 años. En su máximo esplendor ocuparon no sólo todo el continente, sino que llegaron al Próximo Oriente y a Uzbekistán, en Asia Central. Son centenares los yacimientos arqueológicos que presentan restos de su actividad a lo largo de una evolución de más de 200.000 años hasta el momento de su extinción, 25.000 años atrás. Precisamente es noticia reciente la datación del conjunto de la cueva Gorham…
A note to zealots: fundamentally, Charles Darwin was right all along
Science Notebook by Terence Kealey, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham (THE TIMES, 30/10/06):
When I was still at school a boy once rushed into the classroom crying that Darwin had been proved wrong — not by one of those lunatic creationists but by a fellow scientist. The scientist was Stephen Jay Gould and he worked as a biologist at Harvard.
Darwin had suggested that evolution was a gradual phenomenon, and that species were always changing to meet new environmental challenges. But Gould noted that the fossil evidence suggested that, actually, many species survived unchanged for hundreds of millions of years,…
Snakes on the Brain
By Lynne A. Isbell, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 03/09/06):
Snakes hit a nerve in people. How else to explain why the movie “Snakes on a Plane” became an Internet sensation months before it was released in theaters? The very idea was all it took to rouse attention.
That humans have been afraid of snakes for a long time is not a fresh observation; that this fear may be entwined with our development as a species is. New anthropological evidence suggests that snakes, as predators, may have figured prominently in the evolution of…
Affairs to Remember
By Olivia Judson, a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London, is the author of Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. In June, her column The Wild Side will appear on the TimesSelect Web site (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 28/05/06):
Ever since scientists realized that the fossilized bones of ichthyosaurs and mastodons were relics of organisms past, debates have raged about what fossils mean for our understanding of the history of life on Earth, and especially of evolution. No longer. Fossils have become unnecessary to the argument: since we’ve learned to sequence whole genomes, we’ve had far more powerful ways…
Our Mother Tongue
By Dean Falk, chairwoman of the anthropology department at Florida State University, is writing a book on mother-infant communication (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 14/05/06):
On Mother’s Day, it’s customary to speak about the sacrifices our mothers made to improve our lives. But mothers also deserve credit for the pivotal role they’ve played in the story of human evolution. Prehistoric mothers did nothing less than seed the development of our species’ remarkable intelligence.
The story begins at least two million years ago, when our brains started to grow larger, eventually making humans the most cognitively advanced species on earth. This evolution was not…
