Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
August 30, 2013
The bulk of an octopus's nervous system is not in its brain, but its arms. So scientists have studied isolated octopus arms and found that they retain substantial responsiveness to the environment.
It's depressing. I love eating big molluscs, but I've had to cut them out of my diet because there…
August 29, 2013
While we've been waiting and waiting for the physicists to get their act together and deliver on Mr Fusion home energy sources and flying cars, the biologists have been making great progress on the kinds of things that turn biologists on. The latest development: growing tiny little human brains in…
August 23, 2013
There's more! A whole series of photos of nautilus hatching from the Birch Aquarium at Scripps!
August 19, 2013
OK, that's enough. The proprietor of the Monday Metazoan keeps lurching over to big furries -- where are my clackety arachnids? My slimy molluscs? My exotic weird phyla? It's always these mammals, like just now this poor, tiny newsphoto of …AWWW, IT'S A BABY RHINO…
August 16, 2013
The name "Flamboyant Cuttlefish" is perfect, and if you watch the video you'll see even better why they deserve to strut.
Hmm, maybe I should retroactively get my kids' names changed to "Flamboyant Myers". Or at least their middle names. It's got to have an effect.
August 15, 2013
OK, that's not saying much. Lots smarter. Here she takes apart his stupid video.
August 15, 2013
In science, there's data, and there's interpretation. It's really easy to collect data (usually), but interpretation is the hard part — it requires an understanding of context and theory, and an appreciation of the real complexity of the problem. It's tempting to simplify all your models — the…
August 9, 2013
I had a conversation with Tony Ortega about L. Ron Hubbard's book, A History of Man: Antediluvian Technology. He is the author of a blog, Tony Ortega on Scientology, and he had cruelly sent me a copy Hubbard's book specifically to inflame my already enlarged outrage gland.
The post there…
August 8, 2013
When I heard that Steven Pinker had written a new piece decrying the accusations of scientism, I was anxious to read it. "Scientism" is a blunt instrument that gets swung in my direction often enough; I consider it entirely inappropriate in almost every case I hear it used.
Here's the thing: when I…
August 7, 2013
You know I was really pissed off at the crap ENCODE was promoting, that the genome was at least 80% functional and that there was no such thing as junk DNA. And there have been a number of better qualified scientists (like W. Ford Doolittle and Dan Graur and many others) who have stood up and…
August 6, 2013
It's shark week. I'm not going to watch a bit of it; I'm actually boycotting the Discovery Channel for the indefinite future. The reason: An appalling violation of media ethics and outright scientific dishonesty. They opened the week with a special "documentary" on Megalodon, the awesome 60 foot…
July 31, 2013
My upcoming visit to Houston to join Aron and others in protesting Texas creationism is smoking all kinds of interesting characters out of the woodwork. Meet Dr. David Shormann (the "Dr." must be his first name, he sure flings the title about), who has apparently been a person of some influence in…
July 28, 2013
I previously addressed the criticisms of my criticisms of evolutionary psychology by Jerry Coyne; Now I turn to the criticisms of my criticisms he solicited from Steven Pinker. This is getting a bit convoluted, so let me first state the basics.
I dislike evolutionary psychology. Pinker is an…
July 27, 2013
Dealing with various creationists, you quickly begin to recognize the different popular flavors out there.
The Intelligent Design creationists believe in argument from pseudoscientific assertion; "No natural process can produce complex specified information, other than Design," they will thunder at…
July 22, 2013
This was something of a lost weekend for me, with a lot of behind-the-scenes distractions, so I forgot to put up a Friday Cephalopod. So here's a belated Monday Cephalopod to make up for it all.
Amin's Photos
July 18, 2013
It's not the Koh-I-Noor or the Empress Eugenie Brooch or whatever my wife is wearing right now, it's this:
It's a small, broken fossil shell, collected from a fossil outcrop and transported 110 kilometers to a hole in the ground in Italy. Close inspection reveals that before it was broken, there…
July 17, 2013
Looking for information on sugar substitutes? This green stuff is one of them.
via EZGro Garden
July 17, 2013
Thirty, almost forty, years ago when zebrafish were an up and coming model system and very few labs were working on them, we were used to going to conferences and reciting the zebrafish litany, a list of attributes that justified us working on such an oddball animal: we'd explain, for instance,…
July 15, 2013
Oh, look: The first embryos from our new and improved fish system!
We only got a handful today, but you can see why. Those are about 3½ hours old, so we collected too late and the little babies' mommies and daddies had spent the previous few hours assiduously poking around in the marbles…
July 15, 2013
I have disturbed and distressed Jerry Coyne, because I have dissed the entire field of evolutionary psychology. I find this very peculiar, because in my field, Jerry Coyne has a reputation for dissing all of evo devo, so it can't possibly be that we're supposed to automatically respect every broad…