November 22, 2007
Natural Selection is the key creative force in evolution. Natural selection, together with specific histories of populations (species) and adaptations, is responsible for the design of organisms. Most people have some idea of what Natural Selection is. However, it is easy to make conceptual…
November 21, 2007
This is the sixth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.
In the last post in this series I talked about two aspects of large scale climate change: Milankovitch orbital geometry and the cycles of glaciation this effect causes, and the role of plate tectonics and related…
November 21, 2007
The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such…
November 21, 2007
Last night, before going to bed, I was reading the latest story on King Research's survey of IT professionals regarding their stand on Vista. Ninety percent of the 961 surveyed claim to have serious concerns about migration to Vista, and over half have no plans to make the migration at all. I…
November 21, 2007
A form field is one of those boxes on a web page (or elsewhere) that you can fill in with information. Your web browser may try to "auto complete" an entry that you are trying to type in.
For example, when I try to type my name into a box that that I've visited before, when I type the first…
November 20, 2007
My week ends in about five minutes when I pack for imminent departure to California. I'm being whisked out there (pun intended) to prepare the Thanksgiving gravy for an eccentric couple living in a cabin in a remote mountain area on Thanksgiving. And these people are a bit strange. They recently…
November 20, 2007
Can you name the bird?
November 20, 2007
My best photograph of a cheetah.
View Larger image
I took this photo of a cheetah at De Wildt's in South Africa. It is a "King Cheetah." Although there was a period of time when some thought the King was a new subspecies of cheetah, it turns out to be a simple color morph. Although this was…
November 20, 2007
This is the fifth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.
During the 1970s and 80s, creationists had a long list of reasons to doubt evolution, and every one of those reasons was wrong. But they had so many reasons, and it was so hard to keep track of them all, each with…
November 20, 2007
Well, OK, it's actually fake snake oil....
Wired Magazine (wired.com) gadgets section has its annual (I don't really know if it's annual, but it should be) issue of Snake Oil products.
Such as The Orbo:
When it comes to gadgets, perpetual motion machines are bullshit's bread and butter. Steorn,…
November 20, 2007
Well, no news there... but this really irks me. There is this great piece of biological simulation video that came out of Harvard last year ... I've posted bits of it here and there. Well, according to PZ Myers at Pharyngula,
what would a group of good Christians with the aim of renewing…
November 20, 2007
The new creationist textbook, The Design of Life, is now available, or very shortly will be.
This definitive book on intelligent design (ID) comes as a shot across the bow to dogmatic defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy. Written by two key ID theorists, mathematician William Dembski and biologist…
November 20, 2007
The Trivers Willard Hypothesis predicts that under certain conditions, individuals will bias their investment in offspring differently depending on the sex of the offspring. It is believed that this can be as extreme as infanticide or as subtle as providing different amounts of breast milk.
A…
November 20, 2007
Save the date: November 30th. The Christain Study Center knownas the MacLaurin INstitute, of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus will sponsor this event:
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: The Distubring Legacy of America's Eugenics Crusade
Friday, November 30, 2007
7:00 PM - 9:30 PM
FREE
Email…
November 20, 2007
How Whitey Bulger Helps Us Learn About Evolution and Biology!
UPDATE: This is a post I wrote a while back about Whitey Bulger, who was to me back in the day just another local celebrity and crime boss, when I was living and working in the Boston area. But now he is in the news all over the place,…
November 20, 2007
This is a photograph of three Great Pyrenees dogs harassing a brown bear in Northern Norway. This photograph was downloaded by me some time ago from a web site that seems to no longer exist. I'd love to know if anyone knows where this web site is now, or
if the documents previously available…
November 20, 2007
There was never a doubt in my mind as to who would win this one...
November 20, 2007
I live in Minnesota and work in South Africa. That means that every time somebody I don't know hears that I've been to South Africa more than once or am going there for an extended period, they say "Oh, is it mission work ... my [cousin/aunt/uncle] is a missionary there."
Thankfully, I have yet to…
November 20, 2007
I want to point out an interesting opinion piece about the threat of black boxes and the roll of OpenSource software in math.
A key part of the message:
Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, "with this…
November 19, 2007
You've got your turkey all planned out, and you've got some stock. Now, it's time to explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gravy. (And maybe something to put it on.)
I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps.
I don't do recipes. I do…
November 19, 2007
This is the fourth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming.
"Climate Studies" is a "causal" science. Most sciences are "causal" in nature, which is why the sciences and scientists are often loathed and distrusted by people in the humanities and some of the soft sciences.…
November 19, 2007
There are a handful of street preachers around on our campus. Some are just stoners standing on boxes babbling about Jesus, others are older guys, more typical, telling us we are all going to hell and handing out literature, often somewhat aggressively. There was one who was habitually blocking…
November 19, 2007
The question is basic: Is evolutionary change largely random or is it more often shaped by selective forces? The former is linked to what is called Neutral Theory, and it has a lot of support, to the extent that it most likely true. The latter is part of what is sometimes known as the…
November 19, 2007
Well, this is interesting:
Evolution is deterministic, not random, biologists conclude from multi-species study from PhysOrg.com
A multi-national team of biologists has concluded that developmental evolution is deterministic and orderly, rather than random, based on a study of different species…
