Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
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A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday, and what he is going to do on Monday.
[Thomas Ybarra]
Category: Science
Geoffrey Pearce sent me this argument he uses with creationists, and I thought others might find it useful, too. I am regularly approached by young Earth creationists (yes, even in the bedlam of sin that is Montreal...) both on the...
Posted by PZ Myers at 5:36 PM • 198 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Reproduction
Menstruation is a peculiar phenomenon that women go through on a roughly monthly cycle, and it's not immediately obvious from an evolutionary standpoint why they do it. It's wasteful — they are throwing away a substantial amount of blood...
Posted by PZ Myers at 1:52 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Genetics
I've been guilty of teaching bean-bag genetics this semester. Bean-bag genetics treats individuals as a bag of irrelevant shape containing a collection of alleles (the "beans") that are sorted and disseminated by the rules of Mendel, and at its worst,...
Posted by PZ Myers at 1:15 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Art
Urglegurgle. I'm trying to prep a lecture on synapse formation, and just discovered that Herzog's amazing film about Chauvet cave is available…so I'm trying to scribble up technical notes on molecular biology while getting constantly distracted by 32,000 year old...
Posted by PZ Myers at 8:47 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
These canny engineers have at last realized that the proper model for robots is biological, and have built a soft-bodied walking robot. The future belongs to inflatable technology! Have no fear. They're mostly benign. (Also on FtB)...
Posted by PZ Myers at 10:28 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: News
Sad news: Lynn Margulis, advocate of the endosymbiosis theory of eukaryotic origins, has died. She was smart, creative, and promoter of a lot of wild ideas…and to her credit, some of them were even right. I think her greatest strength...
Posted by PZ Myers at 10:35 AM • 45 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
I've heard of the Scoville scale, which measures the potency of spicy peppers. Those boring green bell peppers get a 0; habaneros get a score of 350,000. The stuff those UC Davis police officers so casually hosed into the faces...
Posted by PZ Myers at 12:39 PM • 49 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
It's his birthday. If you were hoping to celebrate by making an apple pie from scratch, as is customary, I hope you remembered to start your universe preheating well ahead of time. It takes over 13 billion years, you know....
Posted by PZ Myers at 6:56 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
This is an article about cephalopods and eye evolution, but I have to confess at the beginning that the paper it describes isn't all that interesting. I don't want you to have excessive expectations! I wanted to say a few...
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:48 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
In my previous post, I described the misguided approach Gauger and Axe have taken to criticizing evolution, and one of the peculiarities of their criticism is that they cited another paper by a paper by Carroll, Ortlund, and Thornton which...
Posted by PZ Myers at 3:00 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
