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Graaarh, physicists BIOLOGISTS
Posted by PZ Myers on April 18, 2013 Graaarh, physicists I thought physics was the most hubristic scientific discipline of them all, but I may have to revise that assessment. Last week I was sent another of those papers published in archiv, the physics repository, making grand pronouncements about evolution, and I made the mistake of simply dismissing it on twitter — it…
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…
Botanical Wednesday: Spring is coming!
Posted by PZ Myers on April 17, 2013 At least, that’s what I keep telling myself as yet another snowstorm bears down on us. (source)
The Ice Age in the Bible
Posted by PZ Myers on April 16, 2013 Every time I despair at the dreadful nonsense from the Discovery Institute, I can reliably turn to Answers in Genesis and despair harder. They’ve just announced that “after two centuries of research”, they’ve finally determined the dates of the Ice Age. They’ve even announced that they’re going to have a chat on their facebook page…
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…
Friday Cephalopod: Where’s Michelangelo when you need him?
Posted by PZ Myers on April 12, 2013 (from the TONMO page on Cephalopod Ethics)
Botanical Wednesday: One, two, three…ha ha ha…four, five, six, SEVEN. Seven purple tentacles, ha ha ha!
Posted by PZ Myers on April 11, 2013 Sorry, I was looking at this Akebia flower, and for some reason I felt a compulsion to count the number of carpels, and I did it out loud in the voice of Sesame Street’s Count. It’s been a long day of proofreading and I’m home all alone, and I think I’m getting punchy. I should…
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 dark side of open access journals?
Posted by PZ Myers on April 9, 2013 The New York Times has an article on the rise of predatory, fake science journals — these are journals put out by commercial interests with titles that sound vaguely like the real thing, but are not legitimate in any sense of the word. They exist only for the resource that open access publishing also uses,…
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: The Too-Common Sludge Duck
Posted by PZ Myers on April 9, 2013 This is a very special bird from Arkansas that will become much more common with more oil pipelines running through the middle of the country. Won’t it be great to be able to readily make an entry in your birding book, soon enough?