February 13, 2009
... and some other guy ...
You must go to just after six minutes 20 second. And then it's like, one second long. But there is is.
*/
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Quiz: Who first and most consistently against slavery, Lincoln or Darwin?
February 12, 2009
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 (5 - 25) are distinctly different and contradictory origin stories. The biblical origin story represented in this text has long been known to resemble a set of Sumerian stories that mainly deal with a multitude of gods interacting (some of these gods are converted to…
February 12, 2009
... and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped by accident.
That would be the…
February 12, 2009
Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for…
February 12, 2009
Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a…
February 12, 2009
In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of…
February 12, 2009
Seed Magazine has a Darwin 200 page, here. It is loaded with cool Darwin stuff. Enjoy!
February 12, 2009
At the Bell Museum. Details here. See you there!
February 12, 2009
There are a few items related to Darwin's Birthday on QM. Please have a look here, where you will find links.
February 12, 2009
And hominids.
We know the fossil record underestimates diversity at least a little, and we know that forested environments in Africa tend to be underrepresented. Given this, the diversity of Miocene apes may have been rather impressive, because there is a fairly high diversity in what we can…
February 11, 2009
Star Trek, the old Twilight Zone, and more. Here.
The technology is not perfect. But it will evolve.
February 11, 2009
As a child in Catholic school, and later in public school and being sent off to "release time" religious instruction, I had the opportunity to read most of the Old and New Testaments of the standard bible. Later, in junior high school, I became interested in comparative religion, and read it all…
February 11, 2009
A Bolivian woman has died from an injection of urine allegedly administered by her friend as a form of health therapy, a prosecutor said Tuesday. Investigating prosecutor Oscar Flores told The Associated Press that 35-year-old Gabriela Ascarrunz died Saturday of an "infection caused by urine that…
February 11, 2009
CALL TO ACTION: Ask your Representative to oppose the H.R. 801 - The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act
(from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access)
February 11, 2009
Last week, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Rep. John Conyers, D-MI) re-introduced a bill that would reverse the NIH…
February 11, 2009
Everyone knows about Darwin's Finches, of the Galapagos Islands. But of course, Darwin made observations of birds throughout his travels on The Beagle. Here, I present a number of passages from The Voyage that include some of these observations.
Struthio Rhea
I will now give an account of ... the…
February 11, 2009
I am the least musical person I've ever met who is still alive. Of course, most nonmusical people don't go around talking about it, so I probably actually know more tone deaf, talentless people than that. It is strange, though. I should be musical. My mother sang semiprofessionally, doing radio…
February 11, 2009
The following is the latest missive from Shawn Otto:
Last Friday you and others in the science community took action and helped to restore $3.1 billion in cuts to science that had been planned in the Senate compromise version of the stimulus bill. That was a good victory for U.S. Science, but it…
February 10, 2009
As I grow older and experience more and more of life, I increasingly think that this is a lesson individuals either get early or simply never get at all.
It All Comes Back To You - Watch more amazing videos here
February 10, 2009
But according to this scientific diagnostic tool, I have the brain of a 25 year old. How old is your brain?????
You'll have to know how to read Japanese to make this work, or you can just follow these instructions:
1) Click on start. The diagnostic tool will count down from 3 and show you some…
February 10, 2009
A quick note for those of you interested in mud volcanoes (and I know there are many of you). From an article titled "Earthquake Triggering of Mud Volcanoes" by Magna et al we learn that ...
Mud volcanoes sometimes erupt within days after nearby earthquakes. The number of such nearly coincident…
February 10, 2009
... Ah, actually, it was a subway sandwich. The details are not important.
But then my cell phone rang. The caller ID showed that it was my daughter's cell phone.
That was weird, because the cell phone's been missing for weeks!!!!!
"Ah, hello?"
"Hi. I found this cell phone."
"I know, that's…
February 10, 2009
Charles Darwin wrote a book called Geological Observations on South America. Since Fitzroy needed to carry out intensive and extensive coastal mapping in South America, and Darwin was, at heart, a geologist more than anything else (at least during the Beagle's voyage), this meant that Darwin would…
February 10, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 7 to 9 p.m.
Bell Museum Auditorium
$10/ free to museum members and University students
The speakers will present in the auditorium from 7 to 8 pm. Birthday cake and refreshments are served after the presentations.
Celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's…
February 10, 2009
One of the really useful features of the new edition of Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction by Genie Scott is the coverage of the socio-cultural context of the so called "debate" between Creationists and Evolutionary Biologists. This tidbit is an example:
The obvious patterns are…
February 10, 2009
Well, that's not exactly what they are saying, but it is what they are doing. Or at least trying to do.
To stamp out voter fraud, GOP legislators have offered a proposal that would make Minnesota's voter-ID laws the most restrictive in the country. But according to their own party, no actual…
February 10, 2009
... are not confined to any one area of interest. Check out this post on How Not to Manage Your Image at Almost Diamonds. It is all about this picture:
Well, it's not really all about that picture, but that picture might be what draws the corporate lawyers to my site to force me to take it down…
