A short list of current posts you won’t want to miss…

Al Franken on the Supply Side Jesus

Mike is going to be campainging for Al, as will I. Gotta get rid of Colemen, and Franken is not merely a “lesser of two evils.” But, we should also be putting our heads together on getting rid of Michele Bachmann while we are at it…

Evolution of vertebrate eyes

PZ Myers has a look at eyes in the blog on peer-reviewed research.

A while back, I summarized a review of the evolution of eyes across the whole of the metazoa — it doesn’t matter whether we’re looking at flies or jellyfish or salmon or shrimp, when you get right down to the biochemistry and cell biology of photoreception, the common ancestry of the visual system is apparent. Vision evolved in the pre-Cambrian, and we have all inherited the same basic machinery — since then, we’ve mainly been elaborating, refining, and randomly varying the structures that add functionality to the eye.

Further Thoughts on ID

One of the major arguments made by the intelligent design crowd is that people can recognise design. They argue that if it looks designed, then the default argument should be that it is designed. This leads to arguments that run something like “you [scientists] need to provide a complete, step by step account of how this evolved, otherwise Darwinism is a failed theory”. Obviously that’s nonsense…

More blogging on peer reviewed research on this post from Aetiology: Influenza meta-update: H5N1 spreading, new swine influenza virus found

… though much of the mainstream media has lost interest in avian influenza, scientists are still busy keeping an eye on things–and H5N1 is still spreading.

Google Earth image of Moses parting the Red Sea, at Neuro Philosophy

[a] God’s Eye View, which depicts four biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, is the work of The Glue Society, a collective of writers, designers and art/ film directors based in Sydney, Australia.

When Steroids Are Banned, Only Cheaters Will Have Steroids

In the wake of the report many are calling for Congressional hearings and saying that the Major League Baseball needs to get tough about steroid use. They blame MLB and the MLB Players Association for being slow to act. I think this is exactly the wrong approach. The real problem is that baseball banned steroids in the first place. It is a fact that when you ban guns, only criminals have guns. The same is true with steroids. When steroids are banned, only cheaters will have steroids.