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Category archives for Science
This is why I could never be an anthropologist
Posted by PZ Myers on July 19, 2012 Somedays, it’s just awful to have the mind of a 12 year old boy. So I’m reading this serious and interesting paper on Neandertals, and learn something new. Two particular characteristics have received considerable attention; pronounced humeral diaphysis strength asymmetry and anteroposteriorly strengthened humeral diaphyseal shape. In particular, humeral bilateral asymmetry for cross-sectional area, and…
Camille Marino is probably going to jail
Posted by PZ Myers on July 17, 2012 Marino is a demented fanatical animal rights activist who runs a website called “Negotiation is Over”. NIO is notorious as the site of some of the most frothingly furious denouncers of all animal research. Marino is from Florida; she was arrested and extradited to Michigan in March to be tried for words she wrote on…
And everyone gets a robot pony!
Posted by PZ Myers on July 14, 2012 Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that’s always on display. Here’s all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance: The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain,…
The carpenter and the pyromaniac
Posted by PZ Myers on July 13, 2012 A very familiar story: a creationist is told that her views are unsupported by any legitimate science, and in reply she rattles off a list of creationist “scientists”. Here we are told by a creationist housewife — as she describes herself — defending her belief that the Giant’s Causeway is only as old as the…
Brains and beaks
Posted by PZ Myers on July 13, 2012 I’m always telling people you need to understand development to understand the evolution of form, because development is what evolution modifies to create change. For example, there are two processes most people have heard of. One is paedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood — a small face and large cranium are features of…
Swimming in the Cambrian
Posted by PZ Myers on July 11, 2012 If you ever get a chance, spend some time looking at fish muscles in a microscope. Larval zebrafish are perfect; they’re transparent and you can trace all the fibers, so you can see everything. The body musculature of fish is most elegantly organized into repeating blocks of muscle along the length of the animal, each…
Something else you can do this weekend
Posted by PZ Myers on July 3, 2012 OK, so you can’t make it to Convergence in Bloomington, Minnesota this weekend, because you live in some strange foreign backwater like the United Kingdom. I guess you could go to the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition instead, if you live somewhere out that way. It’s going on right now, 3-8 July. Oh, wait: they’ve…
The latest Carnival of Evolution is online at Mousetrap.
Woo hoo! ‘Shrooms and acid party at my house tonight!
Posted by PZ Myers on June 30, 2012 We do not have a rational drug policy. There are potent and dangerous drugs that are socially accepted because hey, we’ve always drunk alcohol and smoked cigarettes, while there are milder, far less dangerous drugs that are damned because they’re new and unfamiliar. And so we throw people in prison for long jail terms if…
The curse of the gingers
Posted by PZ Myers on June 24, 2012 Red hair. Freckles. Pale skin. Soulless. What good are they? Seriously — I have a red-haired son and brother and cousins, and you’ve got to wonder why evolution has spawned all these strange color variants — there’s no known advantage to ginger-ness, and plenty of disadvantages. The biochemical cause of these differences are known. Pigmentation…