Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
July 25, 2014
But we have to be clear that it is only a hypothesis at this point. I was reading about domestication syndrome (DS) -- selecting animals for domestication has a whole collection of secondary traits that come along for the ride, in addition to tameness. We are selecting for animals that tolerate the…
July 25, 2014
But still curvy.
Ilan Lubitz
July 23, 2014
I think the engineers are just trying to wind me up, again. Joe Felsenstein tackles a paper published in an applied physics journal that redefines evolution and tries to claim that changes in aircraft design are a good model for evolution. It's a terrible premise, but also, the execution is awful…
July 22, 2014
New genetic disorders pop up all the time -- each one represents a child who may face incredible challenges, or even be doomed to death. A child named Bertrand exhibited some serious symptoms -- profound developmental disabilities -- shortly after he was born, and no one could figure out what was…
July 21, 2014
This flower, over many generations, has warped the poor buff-tail sicklebilled hummingbird's beak into that bizarre curve.
HHMI
July 18, 2014
I'm suddenly seeing more to admire in the beautiful octopus.
July 17, 2014
In case you hadn't heard yet, Science magazine is making a play to reach the supermarket checkout aisle and tabloid market, with exciting new covers featuring sexy womanly body parts and leaving out pointless details like their faces.
I don't know, they could have taken it a step further and…
July 17, 2014
Once again, Casey Luskin demonstrates that he's a biological ignoramus. He is much buoyed by a science report that chloroquinone resistance in the malaria parasite requires two mutations, claims that Michael Behe has been vindicated because that's exactly what he said, and demands an apology from…
July 15, 2014
Dang, I teach all this stuff about genes and chromosomes and epigenetics, but I don't have the advantage of giant floating holographic molecules floating around me. Maybe I'll have to steal this for my classes.
Although it could use some discussion of Blaschko's lines, to explain why you get a…
July 14, 2014
There's a new vampire series on FX by Guillermo Del Toro, The Strain. I haven't seen it -- I don't get that channel -- but I've read the book, which I found interesting for making vampires utterly disgusting, and also for stealing biological analogues for the infection (alas, I thought the story…
July 14, 2014
Dr Gijsbert Stoet thinks we should stop trying to correct gender disparities.
Speaking at the British Education Studies Association conference in Glasgow on Friday, he argued: "We need to have a national debate on why we find it so important to have equal numbers. Do we really care that only five…
July 11, 2014
Cephalopods are the cutest creatures on the planet. How can you deny it?
Octosquid.io
July 8, 2014
We're always talking about this curious phenomenon, that we see lots of women at the undergraduate and graduate level in biology, but large numbers of them leave science rather than rising through the ranks. Why is that? It seems that one answer is that elite male faculty in the life sciences…
July 7, 2014
The EU is sinking €1.2bn (and the US is proposing to spend more, $3 billion) into a colossal project to build a supercomputer simulation of the human brain. To which I say, "What the hell? We aren't even close to building such a thing for a fruit fly brain, and you want to do that for an even more…
July 7, 2014
I've been following the story of stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells with considerable interest, and there's a good reason for that: from the very beginning, it contradicted how I'd always thought about cell states, and if it were true, I'd have to rethink a lot of things,…
June 30, 2014
We've had a very wet summer so far here in the upper Midwest -- the potholes are full of water, our backyard is sodden, the plants are thriving, but that also means that this plague is drifting in vast clouds everywhere.
Alex Wild
The horror. The horror.
June 28, 2014
The debate about intelligent, extra-terrestrial aliens goes on, with the usual divide: astronomers insisting that the galaxy must be swarming with alien intelligences, which is popular with the media, and the biologists saying no, it's not likely, there are probably swarms of single-celled…
June 28, 2014
The zombie plague was a dud. When the first cases emerged, scattered around the globe, everyone knew exactly how to put them down: destroy the brain. The world had been so saturated with zombie comic books, zombie TV shows, zombie novels, and zombie movies in the greatest, if unplanned, public…
June 27, 2014
It's been cephalopod week, and on Science Friday, they featured our old friend, the vampire squid.
June 26, 2014
Chris Mooney is galloping around on his anti-science education hobby-horse again. That's a harsh way to put it, but that's what I see when he goes off on these crusades for changing everything by modifying the tone of the discussion. It's all ideology and politics, don't you know — if we could just…
June 26, 2014
Stinky stuff! This fits perfectly with my biased preconceptions. So here are two examples of chemistry used to analyze things you'd normally run away from.
The oldest traces of human poop have been dug out of a cave in Spain — and it's Neandertal poop. It's about 50,000 years old, and it's been…
June 24, 2014
World War Z was on the Netflix last night, so I made the mistake of watching it. It was terrible. Spoilers abound, so stop here if you care.
The dreadful biology was offensive. Even if the plot were compelling -- it wasn't -- and the actors engaging -- they weren't -- it would have driven me…
June 23, 2014
This one isn't about the picture; go listen to the singing of the bats.
June 23, 2014
We've heard so much about bad behavior at conferences, and how sexist attitudes can suppress the contributions of women. And it doesn't seem to matter what the conference is about: tech, gaming, atheism, skepticism, philosophy, you name it. Now Prof-Like Substance describes the scene at…
June 23, 2014
This is an excellent piece on that quack, Dr Oz, by John Oliver. The first 5 minutes is spent mocking the fraud, but then, the last ten minutes are all about the real problem: the evisceration of the FDA's regulatory power over supplements, thanks to Senators Hatch and Harkin.
OK, there is a…
June 21, 2014
Credentialism always makes for convenient excuses. We love to construct simple shortcuts in our cognitive models: someone has a Ph.D., they must be smart (I can tell you that one is wrong). Someone is a scientist, they must have all the right facts. And of course, the converse: we can use the…