pharyngula

Nothing at all! I gave the students an exam instead! While I got a plane and left ice-bound Morris to fly to Fort Lauderdale, Florida! Bwahahahahahaha! Sometimes it is so good to be the professor. And if ever you wonder why my students hate me with a seething hot anger, it's because I'm such an…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

I just got home a short while ago, and of course I had to spend an hour shoveling snow. So I need this right now. (via Florida Photo Magazine)

Melba Ketchum issued a press release announcing that she had sequenced Sasquatch DNA. That was back in November. It stalled out at that point. It turns out the paper couldn't get past peer review, and no one was going to publish it. We're all heartbroken, I know. But now she has overcome all the…

The latest issue of Priscum, the newsletter of the Paleontological Society (pdf), has an interesting focus: where are the women in paleontology? They have a problem, in that only 23% of their membership are women, and I hate to say it, but the stereotype of a paleontologist is Roy Chapman Andrews…

(via NatGeo)

I missed it, but Angry by Choice, Tangled Up in Blue Guy, and Greg Laden visited the Creation Science Fair yesterday, and Greg Laden already has a write-up. It was as tawdry as expected, with every poster lauding Gawd with bible verses. It was also very small. There is another reason we go: To keep…

I need more photos of the flying squid — there are too few floating around the web.

It's always gratifying to see a scientific organization step up and use their collective expertise to make a clear statement on a political and economic issue. The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) has published an open letter to President Obama rejecting the Keystone XL…

It's a harsh world for us men. Oh, sure, we've got all the political and economic power, and we've got most of the guns, but step into a senior citizens' center and you'll notice the preponderance of elderly women. Men die younger, on average. I'm also acutely aware of the growing disparity as we…

I have a bit of a peeve with a common analogy for the human genome: that it is the blueprint of the body, and that we can find a mapping of genes to details of our morphological organization. It's annoying because even respectable institutions, like the National Human Genome Research Institute, use…

(via NatGeo)

Apparently, computer-based diagnostic algorithms provided cheaply via a smartphone aren't reliable. Who would have guessed? There's a slew of new apps available that allow you to take a picture of your weird mole or mysterious skin lesion, and they'll then scan it and tell you whether you've got…

Another feathered dinosaur has been found in China, prompting Ken Ham to dig in his heels and issue denials. Yet another supposed “feathered dinosaur” fossil has come to light, again in China. (Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, AiG–U.S., reported on another Chinese fossil of a supposed feathered dinosaur in…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

(via TONMO)

Have you seen Missourie House Bill 291? Wow, it's pushing intelligent design, um, boldly. Like a gibbon that just sat down in a pool of sriracha sauce in a big tub of feces, that kind of "boldly". It starts by defining evolution in one paragraph, and by evolution we mean just common descent. It…

Oh gob, the stupidity. The latest wave of anti-choice legislation is based on one trivial premise: it's got a heartbeat! You can't kill it if its heart is beating! So stupid bills have been flitting about in the Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Arkansas, and North Dakota legislatures trying to redefine…

(via NatGeo)

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

I sympathize. There you are, a homely brown speckled bird, and someone finally bothers to take a picture of you, and what happens? Some showoff steals the whole show.

I expect you all to remember that the Discovery Channel will be airing their new episode with footage of the giant squid this Sunday evening. I know what I'll be watching.

Have you ever noticed how the religious regard 'scientism' and 'reductionism' and demands for concrete evidence as barely a notch above obscenities? That is, until they need to reduce complex issues to simplistic claims and don the mantle of Science to support their beliefs. Then they become Holy…

Ken Ham is preaching about what science is again. He's accusing the secular activist Zack Kopplin of being "brainwashed" by evolutionist propaganda, and to support this claim, he once again drags out the tired proposition that there are two kinds of science, historical and observational, and that…

I was bad. I didn't post my summary last week, so this is actually what I taught a week ago and what I taught today. Previously, I'd given an overview of the foundations of modern developmental biology in embryology and anatomy. I gave them more history last week, only not so ancient: what led to…

Eugene McCarthy, the author of that crackpot stabilization theory, has discovered my review and is now making a noise on twitter. He's gone from thanking me profusely for mentioning him, to whining that I stole his figures, to complaining that I don't understand his theory at all, all in the last…

When I visited the Creation "Museum", one thing that shocked me was this display: At the time, I pointed out the pernicious nature of this claim: With complete seriousness and no awareness of the historical abuses to which this idea has been put, they were promoting the Hamite theory of racial…

(via Reefwonders)

It's all Matt Dillahunty's fault. He tells me he's carrying on a correspondence with some guy who claims to have an alternative theory of evolution, and asks me to help him wade through the gobbledygook…so I did. I just didn't realize how much gobbledygook there was. The guy is named Eugene…