thoughts on science, history, and teaching
John M. Lynch is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett the Honors College at Arizona State University. He's also affiliated with ASU's Center for Biology & Society. When he's not an historian of anti-evolutionism, he's an evolutionary morphologist. Much to his surprise, in 2007 he was named the Arizona Professor of the Year. No doubt his students were surprised as well.
Stay abreast of your favorite bloggers' latest and greatest via e-mail, via a daily digest.
April 30, 2006
Category: Politics
Seems that Stephen Colbert made things a little uncomfortable for Shrub at the White House Correspondent Dinner on Saturday night. He and Laura Bush were unsmiling at the end of Colbert's wonderful takedown. You can read more here, there...
Posted by John Lynch at 2:35 PM • 3 Comments
Category: Bits and Pieces
One last poem for National Poetry Month. I had a number to possible poems that I was considering, but in the end settled with Donagh MacDonagh's "Dublin Made Me" - I have a love-hate relationship with Dublin in that I...
Posted by John Lynch at 12:00 AM • 1 Comments
April 29, 2006
Category: Blog Memes and Such
As usual, GrrlScientist started it ... Your Theme Song is Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd "There is no pain, you are receding. A distant ship's smoke on the horizon. You are only coming through in waves." You haven't been feeling...
Posted by John Lynch at 2:37 PM • 1 Comments
April 28, 2006
Category: Blog Memes and Such
I'm procrastinating a little as, like Janet, I have a stack of grading staring at me. The good news is that two of my three classes this semester are over, the bad is that there is still grading to be...
Posted by John Lynch at 2:37 PM • 1 Comments
April 27, 2006
Category: Mammals
From Duke University: Paleontologists at the Duke Lemur Center have assembled a new picture of a 35-million-year-old fossil mammal -- and they even have added a hint of sound. By painstakingly measuring hundreds of specimens of a fossil mammal called...
Posted by John Lynch at 11:51 AM • 2 Comments
April 26, 2006
Category: Carnivores
Mothers are important ... especially if you are a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). From the NSF: Scientists have discovered that a dominant hyena puts her cubs on the road to success before they are born by passing on high...
Posted by John Lynch at 11:33 PM • 1 Comments
Category: Biology
Since GrrlScientist raised the stake by giving a poem by the zoologist Arthur O'Shaughnessy, here's one by marine biologist Walter Garstang (1868-1949) called "Ballad of the Veliger or how the Gastropod got its Twist" from 1928. The Veliger's a lively...
Posted by John Lynch at 5:33 PM • 0 Comments
Category: Anti-evolution
Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism will apparently deal (in part) with evolution: Then, of course, there's the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from...
Posted by John Lynch at 2:33 PM • 5 Comments
April 25, 2006
Category: Bits and Pieces
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. So begins James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a work that makes Ulysses read like...
Posted by John Lynch at 3:30 AM • 0 Comments
Category: Bits and Pieces
Another poem for National Poetry Month, this time by W.H. Auden (my second favorite after Yeats). In this case, it's "Epitaph on a Tyrant" from 1939. Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented...
Posted by John Lynch at 3:05 AM • 1 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Haven't had time to read this yet as my print copy only arrived yesterday, but there's a review of Sean Carroll's From DNA to Diversity and Endless Forms Most Beautiful along with Kirschner & Gerhart's The Plausibility of Life in...
Posted by John Lynch at 2:35 AM • 0 Comments
April 24, 2006
Category: Bits and Pieces
About a week ago, I asked readers to design a banner for the blog. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry ... it was (trust me) a difficult choice. As you can probably see, we have a winner! The banner...
Posted by John Lynch at 9:14 PM • 2 Comments
April 23, 2006
Category: History and Philosophy (often of Science)
In February, I introduced a Sun Catfish (Horabagrus brachysoma) into my tank. Since then, he's probably grown about three-quarters of an inch in length. The species is a member of the the catfish family Bagridae, a widely distributed and...
Posted by John Lynch at 10:29 PM • 2 Comments
Category: Biology
From the Associated Press: Scientists have discovered a mutant gene that triggers the body to form a second, renegade skeleton, solving the mystery of a rare disease called FOP that imprisons children in bone for life. The finding, reported Sunday,...
Posted by John Lynch at 6:18 PM • 1 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Blog Memes and Such
Which cell organelle are you? The ER You scored 50 Industriousness, 51 Centrality, and 15 Causticity! You're the Endoplasmic reticulum! The ER modifies proteins, makes macromolecules, and transfers substances throughout the cell. It has its own membrane, and translation of...
Posted by John Lynch at 4:48 PM • 0 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Intelligent Design
The philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi came up in a recent conversation I had with some colleagues, so I though I'd repost the following from last December ... In 1999, Dembski established the Michael Polanyi Center - an ID institute...
Posted by John Lynch at 3:11 AM • 1 Comments
