jlynch
Posts by this author
January 15, 2009
There are sizable numbers of Neotropical cormorants (Phalacrocorax olivaceus) that hang around the lakes near where I live here in Tempe. As I drove home this evening a flight of about ten of them were moving from one of the lakes westwards to another nearby lake. That sparked the posting of a…
January 15, 2009
An interesting looking paper has just appeared online by John Beatty and Eric Cyr Desjardins that looks at the importance of history in determining form. The abstract reads:
In “Spandrels,” Gould and Lewontin criticized what they took to be an all-too-common conviction, namely, that adaptation to…
January 15, 2009
Solargraphy is the art of using long-exposure pinhole cameras to record the path of the sun across the sky. The above example (click through for enlarged version over at APOD) is a six month exposure taken in Bristol, UK. Here are instructions to do it yourself - no processing required beyond use…
January 14, 2009
Physioprof may be declared illegal in South Carolina and subject to fines up to $5000 and up to five years imprisonment. Details here. And you can thank this guy.
January 14, 2009
As I’ve mentioned before, I spent a good part of my graduate years working on specimens in the collections of the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Some readers may have read of the museum through the essay “Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive O!” in Stephen Jay Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack. Gould…
January 14, 2009
Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069
Portion of Baghdad residents in 2007 who had a family member or friend wounded or killed since 2003: 3/4
Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the…
January 14, 2009
Been busy here. Classes start on Tuesday so there has been a lot of administrivia to do with that. It’s also a mad scramble to get some projects finished before next week.
My buddie PalMD has come out from under the feet of the Hoofnagles and has shiny new premises (“White Coat Underground”) all of…
January 12, 2009
For the second year running, you - yes, YOU, laddie! - have made the BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America. A slip from last year’s #9 slot, but an appearance none the less:
43. You
Charges: You think it’s your patriotic duty to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need. You think…
January 12, 2009
It’s the week before teaching starts again and I’m staring at a “to do” list that somehow managed to increase in size over the winter break. That’s never good, especially when that list includes a few book reviews and a short article. I had hoped that the coming semester would be a relatively quiet…
January 11, 2009
From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted that it no longer holds anything anymore. To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand bars, and behind the bars, nothing.
The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride which circles down to the tiniest hub is like a dance of…
January 11, 2009
Glenn Branch brought my attention to a book by John Henry Egan. Since it is titled 6 Million and Counting: Darwinism, Atheism and Genocide, I think you can see where it is going. The following appears to encapsulate the gist of this fine work of historical investigation:
Charles Darwin invented the…
January 11, 2009
I've had the pleasure of working behind the scenes in a number of natural history museums. While a grad student, I had an office in the Natural History Museum in Dublin, spent a good deal of time every year in the collections of the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and a month at the…
January 11, 2009
Chris Elliot (Philosophy, Hofstra) has made me aware that Project Gutenberg has doubled its coverage of works by Thomas Henry Huxley. Some light reading on this weekend for those not watching the NFL. The additions are:
Conditions of Existence as Affecting the Perpetuation of Living Beings
Coral…
January 10, 2009
It looks like the lights are back on here after the upgrade though comments are not yet switched back. I expect they will be soon.
January 9, 2009
Our masters over at Mission Control will be upgrading our blogging platform (finally!) starting 1:00PM today. The site will still be available for you to read although no new comments or posts will be allowed. We expect to be back live sometime Saturday evening. Enjoy the silence.
January 8, 2009
PZ is reporting that Mississippi is considering one of those inane textbook disclaimer bills (HB 25), the sort of thing that occurred in Alabama and Georgia.
AN ACT TO REQUIRE THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION TO INCLUDE CERTAIN LANGUAGE EXPLAINING THAT EVOLUTION IS A THEORY IN THE INSIDE FRONT COVER…
January 8, 2009
John hasn't read Origin. Not *this* John. And certainly not this one. It's this one - and what he proposes to do is blog while he reads the first edition of that work. I have to say I approve of the use of the first edition - subsequent editions are a little murkier and lack the freshness of…
January 7, 2009
Jim Lippard is organizing SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009. A SkeptiCamp is "a conference whose content is provided by attendees. Where BarCamp is focused on technology, SkeptiCamp instead focuses on topics of interest to skeptics, including science, critical thinking and skeptical inquiry." The event is…
January 7, 2009
Just a quick update on the book I mentioned last night. It appears that it will be published by Dembski's vanity press (for which Flannery is in charge of publicity and marketing). The work is not an edited series of papers, but a re-issue of Wallace's World of Life (available for free here) with…
January 6, 2009
Dembski just announced a forthcoming book for which he is apparently writing a foreword: Michael A. Flannery (ed.) Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace's World of Life Challenged Darwinism. Flannery (MA, MLS) is associate director for historical collections at Lister…
January 6, 2009
John Wilkins has a nice post up regarding the deification and demonization of Darwin. With regards the latter, he particularly discusses something I have intended to blog since I heard about it through a Wall Street Journal article - Roy Davies' book, The Darwin Conspiracy, which repeats the…
January 6, 2009
NCSE is reporting that the first anti-evolution bill of 2009 will be from Oklahoma.
Senate Bill 320 (document), prefiled in the Oklahoma Senate and scheduled for a first reading on February 2, 2009, is apparently the first antievolution bill of 2009. Entitled the "Scientific Education and Academic…
January 5, 2009
Ed reports on a putative new species of iguana that has been found on the Galapagos archipelago. Darwin saw two species (one marine and one land). We now have two additional land species, the Barrington land iguana Conolophus pallidus and this new one which is found only Volcan Wolf, the…
January 5, 2009
From here:
Casey also chides Miller for not doing any knock-out experiments on blood clotting systems. This is heavily ironic as no ID proponent, not even Behe, has done any experiments on the blood clotting system. As I point out in my post Behe vs Lampreys, it's the evolutionary biologists that…
January 4, 2009
Over at PT, Nick piles on Luskin:
One aside: the fact that Behe wrote a chunk of Pandas is important in several ways apart from pure history. First, this makes Pandas, rather than Darwin's Black Box (or really, a few of his web articles), the first published expression of Behe's IC argument. Second…
January 4, 2009
John Wilkins has reminded me of Philip Larkin's poem Aubade:
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now…
January 4, 2009
Ken Miller has offered the final portion of his discussion of Luskin, Behe and clotting. He ends with the following:
The only relevant question at this point is why the Discovery Institute keeps highlighting its own failings in this way. Why are Casey and his employers now -- three years after the…