evolvingthoughts

Who knew? Astronauts are human. A nice little soap opera has developed, according to NASA Watch, in which one female astronaut tried to kidnap (so the police allege) another female astronaut a woman Air Force captain because she was jealous of the relationship the latter had with a male astronaut…

In Yet Another Example of Our Continuing Slide into Mediocrity, the UK government has slashed funds for the British Library, which is going to cut access hours and have to charge researchers. And this from a Labour government, supposedly the champion of public education and culture. Ha!

Wiley, again...

The maker of laws should not practise disputation, but should administer justice. Nor is it fitting that he should appear to have framed the law by contention, but in an orderly manner. For the transaction of public affairs does not demand, as a reward of his labors, the clamor of theatrical…

Some time back I added a little piece of conceptual mapping to the Talk.Origins Archive entitled "So you want to be an anti-Darwinian?" Now Laurent Penet has (I trust faithfully - my French is non-existent, as I found out in Paris) turned it into a French essay, along with Mark Isaak's Bombadier…

What would you say if a government kidnapped someone in a foreign country, who had by their own admission done nothing against their own country, nor broken laws in the country they were kidnapped from, nor of the country they came from, locked them up in solitary confinement for 5 years, tortured…

Here's a tastefully done blog on sex and physics: The Physics of Sex: Where Science and Intimacy Collide. They discuss what beds are best, how lubricants work, optimal strategies for mating based on network theory, and so on. It's a lot of fun. Even safe for work.

Rob Skipper has a relatively accessible post on what Fisher and others think the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection means. The old joke has it that it's neither fundamental nor a theorem, but Rob goes into more detail based on a seminar he and his students did. One thing - "genic variance…

Darren Naish has a typically wonderful post up about the evolution of giraffe necks, with the delightful snippet that until 1999 people thought they had fewer neck vertebrae than they do. I can't add to the biology, so allow me to make a few comments about the role of the giraffe in the history…

Recently, John Lynch mentioned a short passage in a book by historian Peter Dear, called The intelligibility of nature. Dear wrote this: It is one of the remarkable facts about nineteenth-century natural history that the practices of taxonomists were not thrown into disruption by the eventual…

Canadian blogger, columnist and science fiction writer Ed Willett has a nice piece on some taxonomic jokes that have a point, entitled Lazarus, Elvis, zombies and Jimmy Hoffa. It's also a column in the Regina Leader-Post, which speaks well of Canadian media. Willett discusses "Lazarus taxa",…

I didn't know my dad all that well. He died when I was 11, after a long illness that saw him in hospital for nearly 5 years, and he didn't show much evidence that he liked me much. All we ever shared was a love of science fiction. I'm a father myself, of two wonderful kids, but I feel deeply the…

Can't talk. Eating. Paper. Grant application. Start of School Year for Son. Eating... Reading this: "Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology" (Massimo Pigliucci, Jonathan Kaplan) and this: "Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love…

As a chronic insomniac (and consequently incoherent raver - the mutterings at the end of the Beatle's "I'm so tired" represent my daily conversation), I am very interested to read of a possible drug that targets a hormone family called "orexins", low levels of which are found in narcoleptics.…

If I had a category for "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?" this would be in it. The Sciblings are doing it, so I must. I am: Gregory Benford A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist. Which science fiction writer are you? It's oddly apposite. Benford is one…

Australia used to be, for the period of my youth, a secular society. Sure, everyone made the CoE noises, except for the few non-Christians (mostly Jews) who found their way into public office, but basically, the place of religion was defined by the nasty role of Catholic "intellectuals" who tried…

Tetrapod Zoology, which has been one of my favourite blogs for some time now, has finally moved into Da House! It will get fine tuned, as things go on, I'm sure, but the look and feel are secondary to the wonderful content. Go find out about blood-eating birds.

Species: A term which everybody thinks they understand, but which nobody agrees upon, to denote the "basic units" of groups of biological organisms. It is sometimes said, or has been said to me, that one ought not know too much about a topic if you are to define it clearly. This is because the…

Not Darwin. Not Lamarck. Not the Greeks. A French physicist and mathematician... Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1678-1759) was an interesting man. He devised what we now know as the principle of least action, and showed that the earth was flattened. Some other things he did, however,…

PEER have added some clarification over their pre-Christmas release about creationist literature at the NPS bookshops at the Grand Canyon. I interpreted it this way, but their loose wording caused a furor about NPS staff not being able to give the age of the GC. It turns out this was not true.

Darren Naish has announced, sort of, forthcoming evolutionary changes to his blog. Stay tuned for more information...

Fitness. Of the many concepts of evolution, this is perhaps one of the more widely misunderstood. It comes from the unfortunate slogan written by Herbert Spencer and urged on Darwin by Wallace and others: survival of the fittest. People think it means the strongest, or the most aggressive, and…

Coincidentally, with my discussion of Peter van Inwagen's chapter on philosophical failure just past, comes a piece in Philosophy Now by Toni Carey, which asks if philosophy is progressive, which is another way of asking whether there is such a thing as philosophical success. Usually, and here…

In an inadvertently, or perhaps deliberately, funny abstract, D. Osorio notes that there's a role for spam in insect evolution. Spam and the evolution of the fly's eye. Osorio D. School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK. The open rhabdoms of the fly's eye enhance absolute…

I have delivered myself of all kinds of opinions about agnosticism in the past. One common refrain from (in this case, god) deniers is "Are you agnostic about X?", where X is some obviously non-existent object like Thor, fairies, or Republican environmental policies. And the answer to that is not…

A couple more Basic Concepts posts have been put up. Chaz Orzel at Uncertain Principles defines "Force" in physics. And PZ Myers at Pharyngula defines "Gene". However, PZ does this as a molecular biologist would, and ignores the phenotypic effects of genes, and some complications such as…

Not to be too self-promoting, but I have an essay in the Science Blog Anthology, which you can purchase here. There's one or two other essays worth reading as well. Go check it out.

Mark Chu-Carroll has a good short discussion of the statistical concept of a "normal distribution" up.

Ian McCulloch, lead singer for Echo and the Bunnymen has a "Credo" in the Independent Online, in which he delivers himself of this constipated turd: I believe in anti-Darwinism - otherwise why are there still monkeys? Anyone who thinks Darwinism means that the ancestors of a modern species had to…

I just loved the first Sony Bravia TV ad, with the balls bouncing down San Francisco streets, but the second one, with paint "fireworks" is spectacular. Below the fold is the ad and a link to "the making of". The ad: A Quicktime 7 version is here. The "Making of".