Now on ScienceBlogs: Casual Fridays: What makes a good writer, and what motivates them?
Anthropology, Evolution and Science
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.
My blog banners were designed by pough - frequent commenter and Photoshop wizard, Bill Clark, and Chris Whitehouse. Thanks, you all do excellent Photoshop work!
My Amazon Wishlist
Order the Book!
"Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul..."
Mark Twain
"Ideology is a poor substitute for rational thought..."
Afarensis
"It isn't faith that makes good science...it's curiosity"
Prof. Jacob Barnhardt, The Day the Earth Stood Still
"This man wishes to be accorded the same privilege as a sponge. He wishes to think!"
Clarence Darrow, Inherit the Wind
"...I become fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason..."
Klaatu, The Day the Earth Stood Still
"I want you to grab life by its little bunny ears and get in its face..."
The Simpsons
"This is between me and the vegetable..."
Seymour Krelborn, The Little Shop of Horrors
"There are bad laws and cruel laws and the people who enforce them are both bad and cruel..."
Thea, Isle of the Dead
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." Jean- Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"But the limit of tolerance for these human foibles is obtained when the proponent of a questionable scientific doctrine endeavors to maintain it against all possible odds by misrepresentation, misinformation and suppression of contradictory data, and by insinuating unfairness in opponents of his views."
Franz Weidenreich, Morphology of Solo Man
"Man stands alone in the universe, a unique product of a long, unconcious, impersonal material process with unique understanding and potentialities. These he owes to no one but himself, and it is to himself that he is responsible. He is not the creature of uncontrollable and undeterminable forces, but his own master. He can and must decide and manage his own destiny."
George Gaylord Simpson, Life of the Past
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!
Unknown
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Frederich Nietzsche
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The Declaration of Independence
Category: Evolution
This is pretty cool. Science Daily reports on a recent molecular dating study that looked at the evolutionary history of the plant family Proteaceae. From Science Daily:...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 1:06 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Biology
Science News Daily has an interesting story about the mutualism between the senita moth and the senita cactus. At least that's what the title of the piece proclaims. The article is actually about the struggle of one scientist to make...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 3:20 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Botany
National Geographic has a story about an orchid that has evolved to resemble a female wasp:...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 1:55 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Anthropology
This story is a little old. I meant to blog about it when I first heard of it, but got sidetracked. Native Seeds/SEARCH is a program designed to preserve the cultural heritage of native groups by saving and stockpilings seeds...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 2:45 PM • •
Category: Blogs of Note
Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics has an interesting take on the paper about dinosaur hearing - anything that can combine bats and dinosaurs is okay in my book!...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 11:46 PM • •
Category: Evolution
Science Daily reports on an interesting piece of research that explains the evolution of inflorescences. The lead author is a computer scientist (which I mention because IDists frequently invoke computer science to support their claims)....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 9:29 PM • •
Category: Archives
This is a companion piece to the previous post. Studying the evolution of insects can be difficult because they don't fossilize well. But there are ways to study insect evolution. All life affects it's environment in one form or another....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 7:35 AM • •
Neurophilosophy 11.19.2009
The Island of Doubt 11.20.2009
Greg Laden's Blog 11.20.2009
The World's Fair 11.19.2009
Laelaps 11.20.2009
