Darwin:
Darwin and Wallace, chillin' Let's talk about Darwin and Wallace's joint presentation on Natural Selection in 1858. It is not usually the case that I write a blog post for a carnival. I usually just write for the blog, then now and then sit...
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Posted on July 14, 2008 7:03 PM • 2 Comments •
Natural Selection was proposed jointly by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin on this day 150 years ago. Darwin discovered the principle of Natural Selection, and worked it out, over several decades prior. Meanwhile A.R. Wallace also came up with Natural Selection as the mechanism...
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Posted on July 1, 2008 7:29 AM • 1 Comments •
With all this talk about Expelled!, the creationist movie, I thought it was about time to resurrect the review I wrote many moons ago of Flock of Dodos by Randy Olson, along with some updated information. Flock of Dodos is a much better film than...
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Posted on April 27, 2008 11:18 PM • 1 Comments •
Steve Mirsky does a little Darwin Quote Mining reversal exercise in a recent post called "Never You Mine: Ben Stein's Selective Quoting of Darwin:" One of the many egregious moments in the new Ben Stein anti-evolution film "Expelled" is the truncation of a quote from...
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Posted on April 20, 2008 6:10 PM • 7 Comments •
Good question ... what IS in the air? The simple answer is that the air ... the Earth's atmosphere ... is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there's dirt. I want to talk a...
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Posted on April 18, 2008 4:08 PM • 7 Comments •
Myers? Myers? .... Myers? ..... Myers? (He's not here, Ben ... Your producer threw him out.)You know about the incredibly ironic dust up, whereby Expelled! producers kicked PZ myers out of line at a pre-release showing, but failed to notice that Richard Dawkins was standing...
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Posted on March 24, 2008 10:16 AM • 41 Comments •
PZ Myers notes that Ken Miller is making a case for the term design in evolutionary biology. Miller simply claims that "design" comes from the usual, expected evolutionary processes (Natural Selection, etc.). PZ is not buying this bill of goods, and neither am I. One...
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Posted on February 23, 2008 9:52 AM • 0 Comments •
In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses,...
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Posted on February 22, 2008 1:06 PM • 0 Comments •
Everyone knows about Darwin's Finches, of the Galapagos Islands. But of course, Darwin made observations of birds throughout his travels on The Beagle. Here, I present a number of passages from The Voyage that include some of these observations....
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Posted on February 20, 2008 2:39 PM • 0 Comments •
Charles Darwin wrote a book called Geological Observations on South America. Since Fitzroy needed to carry out intensive and extensive coastal mapping in South America, and Darwin was, at heart, a geologist more than anything else (at least during the Beagle's voyage), this meant that...
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Posted on February 18, 2008 2:09 PM • 0 Comments •
