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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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… I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses"]
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Genetics:
This is a very simple, lucid video of Spencer Wells talking about his work on the Genographic Project, the effort to accumulate lots of individual genetic data to map out where we all came from. I've also submitted a test...
Posted on September 29, 2008 2:13 PM • 71 Comments
Epigenetics is the study of heritable traits that are not dependent on the primary sequence of DNA. That's a short, simple definition, and it's also largely unsatisfactory. For one, the inclusion of the word "heritable" excludes some significant players...
Read on »
Posted on July 22, 2008 1:56 PM • 120 Comments
RPM of Evolgen disagrees with my definition of synteny! This is terribly distressing. Especially since, strictly speaking, he is precisely correct. The word has evolved in its usage from the pure form that RPM is describing to a more colloquial,...
Posted on June 30, 2008 6:08 PM • 31 Comments
This is an amphioxus, a cephalochordate or lancelet. It's been stained to increase contrast; in life, they are pale, almost transparent. It looks rather fish-like, or rather, much like a larval fish, with it's repeated blocks of muscle arranged...
Read on »
Posted on June 26, 2008 3:29 PM • 142 Comments
Let's play the most boring card game in the universe! Here are the rules. We start with a fully sorted deck of 52 cards, and we deal out four hands. We don't deal in the ordinary way, either: we give...
Read on »
Posted on June 25, 2008 3:00 PM • 91 Comments
Finals week is upon me, and I should be working on piles of paper work right now, but I need a break … and I have to vent some frustration with the popular press coverage of an important scientific...
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Posted on May 10, 2008 12:32 PM • 198 Comments
That's the sound you should hear when Joe Felsenstein takes on an idiotic claim by Sal Cordova. Would you believe that Cordova claims that Kimura and Ohta's classic 1971 paper "shatters the modern synthesis"? That's what he claims, on the...
Posted on May 5, 2008 3:00 PM • 62 Comments
There in the foaming welter of email constantly flooding my in-box was an actual, real, good, sincere question from someone who didn't understand how chromosome numbers could change over time — and he also asked with enough detail that I...
Read on »
Posted on April 21, 2008 10:43 AM • 200 Comments
I'm busy preparing my lecture for genetics this morning, in which I'm going to be talking about some chromosomal disorders … and I noticed that this summary of Fragile-X syndrome that was on the old site hadn't made it...
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Posted on April 14, 2008 11:49 AM • 28 Comments
The author of All-Too-Common Dissent has found a bizarre creationist on the web; this fellow, Randy Stimpson, isn't at all unusual, but he does represent well some common characteristics of creationists in general: arrogance, ignorance, and projection. He writes software,...
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Posted on February 24, 2008 11:22 AM • 293 Comments
Next time I'm told by some "scientific" racist that he has evidence backing up his contention that certain races are inferior, I'm just going to tell him that there is one more experiment he has to do....
Posted on December 28, 2007 8:27 AM • 310 Comments
On the one hand, this is a strange tale of mutant, bisexual, necrophiliac flies, and you've got to love it for the titillating nature of the experiments. But on the other, much more interesting hand, it's a story about...
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Posted on December 14, 2007 2:25 PM • 32 Comments
It would seem like sweet poetic justice if James Watson were found to be 1/8th African, but I'm afraid I don't quite believe it. This is news coming from a company called deCODE genetics, an Icelandic outfit that analyzes...
Posted on December 10, 2007 1:28 AM • 33 Comments
I spent a summer working on an Arabian horse ranch when i was 17. I loved that place and am crazy about Arabians but... let's face it. We've severely inbred horses for show. Exhibit A: It's not uncommon for an...
Posted on November 28, 2007 3:35 AM • 33 Comments
While reading Jonathan Weiner's book - Time, Love, Memory, I ran across several topics that are quite controversial. I thought that the book did an excellent job of presenting the science of these subjects while remaining neutral. One such topic...
Posted on November 27, 2007 11:46 PM • 58 Comments
