Science
Pharyngula
Category archives for Science
The first day of the rest of my summer!
Posted by PZ Myers on May 7, 2013 It’s going to be a good season, I can tell already. It’s finals week, so I’ll still have an abrupt pile of grading to do on Thursday, but otherwise, my teaching obligations are done for the semester. Now I’m trapped, trapped I tell you, in Morris for almost (I do have two quick trips to…
No more Dan Markingsons
Posted by PZ Myers on April 17, 2013 A few weeks ago I gave a talk in Seattle in which I pointed out that science is not sufficient to define moral behavior. A substantial part of that talk was a catalog of atrocities, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. I said that in purely scientific terms, that was a good experiment; if the…
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Ol’ Three-Eyes
Posted by PZ Myers on April 15, 2013 It’s a frog tadpole with an eye surgically grafted to its trunk! Wait, this is an old story — similar experiments were done at least 20 years ago. You can transplant developing eyes to the tadpole, but the cool thing is that the donor optic nerves will grow into the sensory tracts of the dorsal…
Learn a little developmental biology
Posted by PZ Myers on April 10, 2013 This is a cool video from a textbook publisher (Molecular Biology of the Cell, a very good text) illustrating how Spemann/Mangold’s famous organizer experiment was done. Also cool: those are apparently Edward De Robertis’ hands doing the experiment.
The argument from eyelid development
Posted by PZ Myers on March 26, 2013 This is a new one for me. Earlier today I was summoned on Twitter to address an assertion by a creationist, @jarrydtrokis. I was slightly boggled. He was baffled by eyelid development. It seems he thinks it requires…intelligent design!. … Here’s one for you to ponder Eye lids in the womb… How are they formed?…
Science makes you good! (Sometimes.)
Posted by PZ Myers on March 24, 2013 You’ve probably heard this explanation for the virtue of religion: that even if god doesn’t exist, belief in god (or some other monitoring authority) makes people behave more morally. There have been many experiments that have actually shown that people are nicer or more generous when exposed to religious concepts, such as this one by…
What I taught today: farewell to flies (for a while)
Posted by PZ Myers on March 11, 2013 My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles’ Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Biology~ A good portion of what I’ve been teaching so far uses Drosophila as a model…
We are the WEIRD
Posted by PZ Myers on March 1, 2013 Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, that is. One of the common complaints about evolutionary psychology is that it claims to be addressing evolved human universals, but when you look at the data sets, they are almost always drawn from the same tiny pool of outliers, Western undergraduate students enrolled in psychology programs, and excessively…
I can defend both Lawrence Krauss and philosophy!
Posted by PZ Myers on February 26, 2013 Philosophers are still grumbling about Lawrence Krauss, who openly dissed philosophy (word to the philosophers reading this: he recanted, so you can put down the thumbscrews and hot irons for now). This is one of those areas where I’m very much a middle-of-the-road person: I am not a philosopher, at least I’m definitely not as…
What I taught today: maternal effect genes
Posted by PZ Myers on February 25, 2013 My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles’ Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Biology~ You know I teach the 8am courses every term, right? Every semester for years I…