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Afarensis

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afarcomp3.jpg Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called Transitions:The Evolution of Life His previous blog can be found here.
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Yeah he's the Dick to the Dawk to the phd, he's smarter than you he's got a science degree! Yeah he's the Dick to the Dawk to the phd, he's smarter than you he's got a science degree!
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« Protein Evolution and Metabolic Rate | Main | Coal Mining and Indigenous Peoples »

Send Me Your Science Links

Category: Administrative
Posted on: October 10, 2007 6:41 AM, by afarensis, FCD

I have been appointed "links curator" for the links page at the redesigned The Panda's Thumb. My job will be to find the best resources related to evolution on the web. I have already added about eighty links and have quite a few more to put up. In the meantime, I thought I would avail myself of the collective wisdom of the scientific blogosphere. What websites, blogs, etc., do you find helpful or read/use on a regular basis. To get an idea of the type of websites I am looking for you can consult the links page. In terms of blogs, they can come from any field (biology, anthropology, paleontology, geology, ecology, genetics, etc) as long as they are related to evolution an/or anti-creationism.

Finally, I have a question. I have a large number of links to various and sundry individual webpages where pdf's have been made available for download, for example, this page by Dan Hartl. I assume it is okay for them to be making these pdf's available for download, but you never know. I don't want to get anyone in trouble with the copyright police, but these types of sites are incredibly useful. So, my question is do I link to them or not?

You can leave suggestions in the comments or email me (see the Contact tab above for my email)

Comments

I assume that scientists would like their papers linked to and read.

I'm not so sure about the "Darwiniana" label, since creationists are hunting for signs of idolization. It may have old ancestry, but why not "History" or "150 years of evolutionary science"?

WEASEL, ev and Avida software are often discussed here and elsewhere. Maybe a link each?

Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | October 10, 2007 9:44 AM

Finally, I have a question. I have a large number of links to various and sundry individual webpages where pdf's have been made available for download, for example, this page by Dan Hartl. I assume it is okay for them to be making these pdf's available for download, but you never know. I don't want to get anyone in trouble with the copyright police, but these types of sites are incredibly useful. So, my question is do I link to them or not?

Lots of publishers have gotten in touch with reality and written policies that allow authors to "self archive" their own publications. You should go ahead and link to such self-archiving pages on the assumption that the authors know what they can get away with. (I daresay that any publisher who does not have a self-archiving policy and decides to crack down on it will soon find themselves out of the scientific publishing business.)

However, you should never put copies of other people's articles on your own server.

Needless to say, IANAL.

Posted by: Bobby | October 10, 2007 9:46 AM

Don't forget the advocacy groups, such as Florida Citizens for Science: http://www.flascience.org/wp/

Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | October 10, 2007 11:05 AM

Thank you!
Thank you!
Outstanding resourse. All these links in one place will have me reading gleefully for quite some time.
Thank you!

Posted by: Rocky | October 10, 2007 2:39 PM

A good site is CreationTheory. It is a site debunking Creationism and Intelligent Design.

Posted by: Ŭalabio‽ | October 10, 2007 11:29 PM

Well, I will be posting/reposting all my evo/creato at

Stones and Bones.

Posted by: Gary Hurd | October 11, 2007 1:23 AM

If there are illegitimate PDFs on the web (and not password-protected) then the copyright police will find out about them anyway. Linking to them from Panda's Thumb will at most make it happen a few days earlier. So I don't think there's any issue about getting people in trouble.

Don't forget to run a link-checker from time to time. (Thinks: I haven't done it on my own site for a while - probably a bunch more work coming up ...)

Posted by: Stephen | October 11, 2007 4:28 AM

Oh, and could I suggest you borrow PZ's idea and put links to Creationist/Pseudo-science sites in Comic Sans?

Posted by: Stephen | October 11, 2007 4:39 AM

If dthe author of a pdf pas made something available to Panda's Thumb or elxewhere, then the author probably knows what they're doing. If there is a link somewhere, to some professor's series of articles, and they're pdf's, they are probably free to download. You might want, in such cases, to protect yourself with something like a link to Dr. X'x site, and let the Gentle Reader download from there. If it's from cerain publications, like PLoS, it's free to download, usually after a certain amount of time. PNAS(PRoceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)also does this, and all their articles are free to download, although not always right6 away. A link to PLoS might be another good idea. For other cases where pdfs are listed, it's probably all right to download them, as long as one is not turning around and selling them. Very few such papers, as far as I can tell, are actually copyrighted. But for those cases, as usual, proceed with some caution.
Anne G

Posted by: Anne Gilbert | October 11, 2007 2:02 PM

We should put together a list of journals that contain a lot of evolution biology journals and journals that get high profile evolution papers:

Nature, Science, PNAS, PLOS, Plos Biology, PLOS Genetics, Evolution, Amnat, Genetics, Theoretical Population Biology, Journal of Theoretical Biology, BMC Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution, (some anthropology journals), Journal of Human Genetics, Genetical Research, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, ...

Posted by: Reed A. Cartwright | October 11, 2007 7:10 PM

World's oldest painting on a constructed wall (ABC News item)

Posted by: John Scanlon, FCD | October 12, 2007 12:02 AM

Got to include the Evolution Education Wiki!

Posted by: Doddy | October 12, 2007 8:42 AM

Afarensis,

You are doing a great job with the links. You should at your name and position as "links currator" somewhere on the page. Say at the bottom or below the toc. You should take credit for your good work.

Posted by: Reed A. Cartwright | October 16, 2007 1:51 PM

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