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Repost: On devolution

I recently [some time back now - this being a repost] received this question in email. I hope the correspondent doesn't mind my posting it anonymously. I notice from www.dictionary.com that the word "Devolution" is a term in biology which means "degeneration". Is it an antonym of the word "Evolution" (which is the most likely reason why creation "scientists" state tiresome statements like "evolution would argue for improvements all the time")? Or does the word "devolution" touch on stuff that may or may not be related to evolutionary biology? Traditionally, degeneration meant simply change…

The myth of Darwin's delay

Many ideas in the history of biology get going for reasons that have to do with agendas, ideologies, and plain old bad scholarship rather than the results of research. In particular, myths regarding the motivations of historical figures. I well remember Erik Erikson's execrable attempt to psychoanalyse Luther from a distance of 500 years, culminating in the claim that he was anal retentive (and, therefore, so was his theology). There are plenty of these myths in the history of biology. One of the longer lasting ones, although it turns out to be a late arrival, is the myth that Darwin didn'…

Infants perceive language sounds differently by age 6 months

A study doesn't have to be brand-new to be interesting. Consider the situation in 1992: It was known that adults are much better at distinguishing between sounds used in their own language compared to other languages. Take the R and L sounds in English. In Japanese, both of these sounds belong in the same category of sounds: both sounds have the same meaning, which is why it's difficult for native Japanese speakers to learn the difference between the sounds in English. In 1992, it was thought that this linguistic specialization occurred at about the age of 1, when infants learn their first…

Nano-Alchemy: Turning Nickel into Platinum

With nanotechnology rapidly advancing, the sci-fi dream of a Star Trek replicator becomes increasingly less fantastic. But such radical technology would, in theory, require the kind of subatomic manipulation that far exceeds current capabilities. Scientists lack both the equipment and the fundamental knowledge of quantum mechanics (the Standard Model, for all its elegance, remains incomplete) to build items from the raw stuff of quarks, gluons, and electrons . . . but what about alchemy? Even Isaac Newton, credited with the dawn of the Age of Reason, felt the mystical draw of alchemy,…

The visible embryo: a visual history

The Moment of Conception and Ensoulment Illumination from Jean Mansel, Vie de Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ, fifteenth century, fol. 174. 11.1 x 15.8 cm. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris From "Making Visible Embryos" Via the invaluable Morbid Anatomy, I discovered a remarkable new website, "Making Visible Embryos." Assembled by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood of the University of Cambridge, with the support of the Wellcome Trust, it traces the evolution of our understanding of the human embryo, beginning with an unexplored mystery within the inaccessible womb, through epigenesis and…

Lott's claim that women are 2.5 times more likely to be injured if they offer no resistence

So, apart from pretending to be one, what expertise does Lott have on women and gun issues? Well, he wrote this NRO article on women and guns. It was widely linked by bloggers, who felt that the key statistic was this: "The probability of serious injury from a criminal confrontation is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than resisting with a gun." Lott makes the same claim in More Guns, Less Crime, in The Bias Against Guns and in op-eds and speeches and on radio and TV shows. Along with the "98% brandishing" it is one of his favourite…

The Vaccine War: Telling it (mostly) like it is about the anti-vaccine movement

Yesterday, I expressed concern about a FRONTLINE episode that was scheduled to air tonight entitled The Vaccine War (which, by the time you read this, should be available for online viewing in case you missed it). My concern was that there was going to be a heapin' helpin' of false balance, based on the promotional materials. My concerns were later somewhat assuaged based on the pre-airing reaction of the anti-vaccine movement, which was fairly wary, if not hostile even. Of course, any television show that doesn't conclude that their view that vaccines cause autism is at plausible or even…

Blogging my course design process (part 1.1)

After articulating that my most dire need is to get funded, it may seem disjointed to embark on a series of blog posts about teaching, but there you have it, the life of a professor at a place that requires both research and teaching. I still contend that I will get fired from my job much more quickly for failure to teach a course than failure to get funded, so I must do something about the new preparation I have for the fall. The new course, "Experimental Design and Data Analysis," is a graduate-only course with only a loose definition in the course catalog. It hasn't been taught for the…

It's nice to be noticed

Remember how I alluded to the fact that perhaps I've been doing a little too much blogging about dichloroacetate and the unscrupulous "entrepreneurs" who are taking advantage of desperate cancer patients to sell the stuff to them? Well, I can't resist mentioning something truly amusing that I just noticed. The "health freedom" warriors and "entrepreneurs" responsible for The DCA Site and BuyDCA.com appear to have noticed me and my humble efforts. How do I know that they've noticed me? Remember the long exchange between Heather Nordstrom and two people questioning the ethics and legality of…

The Roman Polanski Drama: "Then" vs. "Now" effects.

The Roman Polanski story has certainly gotten interesting. Well, actually, the story is still only mildly interesting, but the discussion about it has developed in interesting ways. So, I thought I'd muddy the waters by throwing in a few thoughts. This is one of those situations where people have started judging each other on their opinions. Don't even think about doing that with me. I have not actually formulated an opinion so you'd be wasting your time and mine. The LA authorities, Polanski's lawyers, none of those involved, have contacted me about my opinion, and I'm not influencing…

Spudly

Probably the biggest loss to last year's flooding in upstate New York was my potato crop. I could have dug them by the end of August, but as the saying goes "shoulda but didnta." It was a warm summer and potatoes stay better in the ground in August here than they do in my house - unless, of course, they are under 3 feet of water. The big loss wasn't the potatoes I had planned to eat all winter, although that was a pity - I can buy potatoes from farms that weren't flooded, up on higher ground. What I lost were 5 years of saved potato seed, varieties initially purchased and now adapted to…

What is healthcare like in the Netherlands?

The Dutch really have it together on health care, they have a system that has been proposed as a model for the US to emulate. In stark contrast to many other European systems, it's actually based entirely on private insurers, rather than a single-payer or entirely national system. Yet the Dutch system is universal, has far superior rates of satisfaction with quality of care and access, and still costs a fraction of what we pay for health care per capita in the US. How is this possible? You can read the Wikipedia entry on the Dutch system or read about it on their Ministry of Health's…

Everyone's Talking About the BECB!

As part of my one-man media blitz for my new book Among the Creationists: Dispatches From the Anti-Evolutionist Frontline, let me call your attention to a few posts. P. Z. Myers has posted a nice review.: What do you do on airplanes? I usually devour a book or two, usually something popcorny and light, sometimes something I need to get read for work. On my trip home from Washington DC, I lucked out: I was handed a book the day I took off, and it turned out to be a damned good read. Glad you liked it, P.Z! On the other hand, I do feel I must respond to his one criticism: Jason Rosenhouse…

Is there really wisdom in crowds?

Here's an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds. It starts by discussing the surprising accuracy of Wikipedia. The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are), is not due to the average quality of the edits (or mutations). Instead, it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought…

The New York Times and fear mongering about the Apple Watch and wearable tech

The New York Times Styles Section giveth. The New York Times Styles Section taketh away. Last week, The NYT Styles Section published an excellent deconstruction of the pseudoscientific activities of Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, by Courtney Rubin. Although skeptics might think that it was a tad too "balanced" (as did I), by and large we understand that this was the NYT Style section, and seeing a full-throated skeptical deconstruction of The Food Babe's antics in such a venue is just not in the cards. That's what I'm there for (not to mention other skeptics like Steve Novella), such as…

Rules for Radicals 1: The Prologue

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals This is the beginning of a promised (and late) series of posts discussing Saul Alinsky's 1971 book Rules for Radicals. Alinsky started out in community organizing in the 1930s, working in Chicago's infamous "Back of the Yards" neighborhood. Rules for Radicals is a how-to guide for organizing, based on the…

Birds in the News 97 (v3n24) -- Labor Day Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Among the animals Darwin spotted on the Galapagos Islands were the blue-footed boobies, Sula nebouxii excisa. The males show off their blue feet to potential mates with high-stepping dances. Image: Stephen C. Quinn, AMNH. [larger]. Birds in Science A new study published in the leading ornithological journal Ibis has uncovered that for the vast majority of bird species, there are more males than females. The discovery suggests that populations of many of the world's threatened birds could therefore be overestimated,…

The Shallows

I've got a review of The Shallows, a new book by Nicholas Carr on the internet and the brain, in the NY Times: Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the "Phaedrus," he lamented the invention of books, which "create forgetfulness" in the soul. Instead of remembering for themselves, Socrates warned, new readers were blindly trusting in "external written characters." The library was ruining the mind. Needless to say, the printing press only made things worse. In the 17th century, Robert Burton complained, in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," of the "vast chaos and…

Saturday Recipe: Home-Made Roasted Tomato Salsa

Lately, friday's have just been too busy for me to get around to posting a recipe. So I decided to switch my recipe posts to saturday. I'll try to be reliable about posting a recipe every saturday. I tried making homemade salsa for the first time about about two months ago. Once I'd made a batch of homemade, that was pretty much the end of buying salsa. It's really easy to make, and fresh is just so much better than anything out of a jar. When it takes just five minutes of cooking to make, there's just no reason to pay someone else for a jar of something that's not nearly as good. This…

One Reason Why Bankers Want Bonuses Explains Everything You Need to Know About Big Sh-tpile

By now, you might have heard about the growing outrage that bankers at banks receiving bailout money are drawing bonuses. It's reached the point where Sen. Claire McCaskill has proposed capping bankers' income at a salary equivalent to that of the president of the U.S. I didn't really have much to add about how ridiculous the arguments for paying the bankers bonuses when their firms have been nationalized (if, nothing else, most employees, who through no fault of their own, working in dying businesses are getting laid off--that is, no salary at all). But a quotes from a NY Times article…

Reading Diary: Nine algorithms that changed the future by John MacCormick

John MacCormick's new book, Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers, is very good. You should buy it and read it. Among all the debates about whether or not absolutely everybody must without question learn to program (pro, con), it's perhaps a good idea to pause and take a look at exactly what programs do. Which is what this book does. It starts from the premise that people love computers and what they can do but don't have much of an idea about what goes on inside the little black box. And then, what MacCormick does is take nine general types…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: an atheist Christmas

At least one correct answer to the question "What's the difference between God and Santa Claus?" is "There is no God." Some of you may object. What's the evidence for Santa Claus, Mr. Big Shot Atheist!? Just ask my daughter. OK, I admit she is now faithless. The scales have fallen from her eyes. She realizes there really isn't a Santa Claus. The only excuse I can make for her is that she is exhibiting what most people would call age appropriate behavior. After all, she's 30 and has two children of her own. But we believe the arrival of the little ones (the oldest isn't 3 years old yet) will…

Earth Day: Changes I Can Make

by Lindsay Wheeler Although today's the official Earth Day, I've been reflecting more and more on my own lifestyle and the efficiency with which I live.  It started a few months ago, when I was watching the BBC series Planet Earth with my brother, and I found myself almost to the point of tears thinking about what we, as a human race, have done to the planet.  I grew up spending summers in the backcountry of Wyoming and I have always considered myself as a person who has loved the outdoors.  However, living in Washington, DC, I often find it easy to forget the fragility of the world…

Harm to Communities from "Goods Movement" System

This month's Environmental Health Perspectives features an informative but disturbing article by Andrea Hricko entitled  "Global Trade Comes Home".  It describes the adverse impact on communities of the "goods movement" system, where imports to the U.S.---electronics, food, toys, furniture--- make their way from waterfront ports to trains and trucks, and into warehouses and to our neighborhood stores.  Hricko, an associate professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine, with first-hand experience working with families who live near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, paints the…

Mending Food Waste

Globally, almost half of all the food the world produced is thrown away.  This Global number hides some critical differences however.  In most of the Global South, food is lost to lack of preservation techniques.  Grain gets wet in the field, and instead of being dried with machines as it might be in the US, it molds and is lost.  Someone slaughters a cow, and what doesn't get eaten spoils in the heat.  Fruit is harvested but bad weather means that it doesn't dry adequately....you get the idea.  The majority of food is lost shortly after harvest, globally. In the Global North, the picture is…

Popeyes, KFC’s supplier has sanitation problem, Senator takes notice of unsafe conditions

Drivers honked and waved. They gave thumbs up to the 30 people on the sidewalk. The group was holding signs outside a North Carolina poultry plant. “El baño” – the bathroom – was the word catching the drivers’ attention. The scene on August 14 was a demonstration in front of the Case Farms poultry plant in Morganton, NC. The company supplies chicken to KFC, Popeyes, and Taco Bell. Alisa Olvera outside of Case Farms poultry plant in Morganton, NC. The reason for the peaceful protest? The Case Farms plant has a sanitation problem. Workers don’t have access to the bathroom when they need to…

What It Takes

In the ongoing string theory comment thread (which, by the way, I'm really happy to see), "Who" steps off first to ask an interesting question: One way to give operational meaning to a theory being predictive in the sense of being empirically testable is to ask What future experimental result would cause you to reject the theory? I think what worries a lot of people about string thinking is that it seems so amorphous that it might be able to accomodate any future experimental measurement. In fact I am not aware of any string theorist's answer to this basic question. It's an interesting…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 5

The Bottleneck Years Chapter 4 Table of Contents Chapter 6 by H.E. Taylor Chapter 5 FabNet, May 18, 2055 I sat at the window watching Matt roll away in his electric chariot. When he was gone, I stared at the lake musing how different we were. We were identical and yet we weren't. Matt definitely had a unique way of looking at things. It started when he was a teenager. He picked up a second hand 3-D printer for next to nothing at a yard sale. 3-D printers, or fabs, short for fabricators, were capable of building any desired object layer by layer out of plastic or ceramic goop. "They're…

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for Soon

A few days ago I suggested that Willie Soon's career may be taking a nose dive soon. I was right. Tomorrow's New York Times has a story that has as many leaks as an old canoe, so we can see it now in various outlets. The story is out and linked to below. Before going into detail I just want to note that Justin Gillis is doing a great job at the New York Times. Anyway, you can read the following items, the most recent listed here: Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for a Doubtful Climate Scientist Willie Soon Gate Willie Soon, will he soon be fired? It really looks like Willie Soon has been paid…

Weekend Diversion: Celebrating Science and Believing in Yourself

"She said believe in yourself and believe in your dreams. I took away those words and will keep them in my memory for a lifetime." -Dominique Dawes Every weekend, I try to come to you with a story that is a break from the regular physics and astronomy stuff I write about. This weekend, I was listening to a sweet song by Alison Krauss, I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby, and looking at a picture of the Elephant Nebula. Why is it called the Elephant Nebula? Well... it kind of looks like... well... Yeah. It's an elephant. Maybe a snuffleupagus, but probably an elephant. And one of the first…

Buying or Selling a Home in the Twin Cities, Minnesota?

If so, I have a recommendation for you. We recently sold our old house and bought a new one, and moved. The main reason we did this: to get closer to Amanda’s place of work. We managed to turn a commute that ran from 35 minutes to 1.5 hours (on really bad winter days) each way to one short enough that Amanda will usually bike, with about a five or six minute drive on non-biking days. Probably a ten minute drive on the worst winter days. The main reason we did this now rather than a couple of years ago: our house was under water thanks to the GB Economic Crisis. In fact, we weren’t sure if…

The Love of a Good Dog

Natalie Angier has a piece in the Times this morning about the loss of a beloved pet cat: Cleo was almost 16 years old, she'd been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief -- not so much its intensity as its specificity. It was very different from the catastrophic grief I'd felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn't really been aware of until, suddenly, they were…

Charity, Mission Trips, and Mandatory Service

Not long before the Matthew Nisbet post about uncharitable atheists crossed my RSS feeds, I had marked a Fred Clark post about mission trips that has some really good thoughts about the mechanics of charity: But the point of these mission trips is not only to get [a rural school in Haiti] built. That's part of it, but it's not the only goal. The mission trip is also designed to give the American youth group a tangible, visceral stake in the fate of the Haitian community. This is vital for the people in Haiti too. The problem with the calculus above is that it presumes that the total level of…

Campus Visit Season

It's college application season, and the New York Times style section ran a nice article Sunday about parents touring colleges with their children. It's mostly about the bonding that goes on on such trips, which is probably instantly recognizable if you're the sort of wealthy Northeasterner who is the target demographic of the Sunday New York Times. I'm sort of on the fringes of that demographic, so what really resonates for me is a different part of the story: Tom Likovich of Bronxville, N.Y., who was at Hamilton College with his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Alex, on a recent weekend morning,…

Roy Varghese and the exploitation of Antony Flew

I have not been shy about my contempt for the crackpot, Roy Varghese — he's one of those undeservedly lucky computer consultants who struck it rich and is now using his money to endorse religion. He's a god-soaked loon who pretends to be a scientific authority, yet he falls for the claim that bumblebees can't fly and therefore there flight is evidence for a god. Really. He's that deluded. I've been too kind, however. You must read this New York Times article, The Turning of an Atheist, in which it turns out that Varghese is also a contemptible manipulator. It's the story of Antony Flew, the…

XMRV: Im not so positive youre positive, but Im positive theyre positive.

When scientists are creating tests to detect viruses, they need to balance two factors: Sensitivity Specificity A 'sensitive' test is no good if it cross-reacts with other proteins/viruses/antibodies. A test with high 'specificity' is no good if you miss 3 out of 10 infections. Of course, then you need to worry about cost (a perfect test is unusable if no one can afford it) and speed (acute diseases need fast diagnoses, and who wants to wait 3 months to find out if they have a life-altering chronic disease?), and other factors. So scientists normally use tests that view a putative disease…

Liar, Lunatic, Lord

Meanwhile, over at Town Hall Dinesh D'Souza serves up yet another steaming pile of religious idiocy. His subject is an exchange between Rabbi Jacob Neusner and Pope Benedict. He opens with a gratuitous slap at Richard Dawkins: Even so, Neusner's treatment of Christ could not be more different than that of Dawkins. One of the main differences is that Dawkins is a biologist and Neusner is a scholar of ancient texts and history. Consequently Dawkins' historical and literary understanding is at the eighth grade level, while Neusner brings to his work a depth and sophistication worthy of a man…

Links for2009-07-30

The missing research program for space colonization -- KarlSchroeder.com "No amount of data about how the human body reacts to zero-G is going to answer the important question, which is: how does the human body react to extended periods under fractional gravity--like the moon's 1/6 G or Mars's .38 G? If there's a potential show-stopper to colonizing other worlds, it's going to be how our physiology responds to fractional gravity, not zero gravity." (tags: space science medicine blogs physics planets technology) ...My heart's in Accra » Fun and games with human misery "The best $50…

Libertarian Paternalism?

Ilya Somin from the Volokh Conspiracy has this post on a resurgent paternalism -- using as its justification new findings from behavioral economics: "Libertarian Paternalism" is all the rage in law and economics circles these days. To slightly oversimplify, libertarian paternalists claim that people systematically make mistakes as a result of cognitive errors and biases. Afterwards, they end up with outcomes that they themselves consider inferior to at least some of the alternatives they could have gotten by making a different decision in the first place. As a result, third party intervention…

Zombies get philosophical

You may not think of our flesh-eating diseased brethren as being the thoughtful types. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. As Sci mentioned, I'm gonna be holed up in the Costco for a while so I got time to think about it. They're the slow-moving-undead zombies, not those ultra-quick "infected" (I hate those creepy bastards). I rolled down those big steel doors, barricaded them with anything heavy I could find here, gathered up all the lighting supplies for when the power goes out, bandaged up that bite on my arm, and I've taken to making jerky out of all this meat I've got laying around…

Cramer/Stewart, The Right, The Wrong, and Democratic Loyalty.

(Fair warning: I usually keep the language clean in this blog, but I didn't manage it this time. Below the fold may be NSFW.) OK, I admit it. I've still got last night's Jon Stewart CNBC Massacre (with full orchestration and five part harmony) stuck in my mind. I think that's going to be the case for at least a little longer, because I'm still trying to wrap my mind around some of the things I've learned over the course of the whole mess. One of the (several) things I keep coming back to is just what some of the criticism of last nights production demonstrates. Some critics follow the…

Economics as Evolution

The Economist has an article about an economist using evolutionary ideas. To wit: ...Eric Beinhocker, of the McKinsey Global Institute, has undertaken his own 500-page haj, entitled "The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics". In places (such as its headline call for a "paradigm shift" in economics) the book may irk Mr Krugman and other gatekeepers of the profession. But it is good enough, and scholarly enough, to warrant their attention rather than their scorn. Indeed, Mr Beinhocker is himself critical of "loose analogising" between biology and…

Alliteration improves memory performance

I've always been a fan of literary studies -- I was an English major in college and I continue to blog about literature on my personal blog. But when I first learned about the concept of alliteration (I must have been in middle school), I was unimpressed. Obviously making a poem rhyme requires some serious skill, since not just one sound but a series of sounds must be repeated at the same point in the poem's meter. Alliteration, by contrast, only requires the repetition of a single consonant sound at the beginning of a few words. Clearly, creating clever combinations of consonant sounds wasn'…

Some Unfounded Alarmism Regarding Compact Fluorescent Lamps

Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), or "energy saving light bulbs", are much more energy efficient than conventional light bulbs, and they have a significantly longer lifetime. On top of that, replacing your conventional bulbs with CFLs won't just save energy, but will also save you money. Most importantly, this is one small action that we can all contribute to the fight against global warming. However, yesterday's New York Times included an article by Leora Broydo Vestel entitled "Do New Bulbs Save Energy if They Don't Work", which hypes up concerns about compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) not…

Don't be a Closed Source Moron

Morons are so annoying. Even the ones that are just passing by, the ones you don't really have to talk to. These days I often have lunch in a public dining area where most of the patrons are scientists or geeks, or students learning to become scientists or geeks. The other day two geeky scientist guys were walking by my table talking to each other too loudly for me to ignore. So one guy, he says: "You know we can solve this problem. I have a lot of faith in our Open Source solutions." (hmm, cool, I thought). The other guy responded: "Yea, well, I guess it all depends on how much…

Sizzle is a fizzle

I'm a fan of Randy Olson. Don't get me wrong about that. His Flock of Dodos makes a valuable point about science communication, and goes beyond the trite standard narrative of brilliant scientists battling ignorant creationists. There's a real problem, and caricature won't solve it. Randy set aside his career as an academic marine biologist to become a filmmaker. His decision to pursue a career in science communication is admirable, more scientists should take the time to learn how to communicate effectively and find ways to communicate with a general audience. That said, I didn't care…

Lessig for Congress

It's immensely exciting to see Larry Lessig thinking about a run for the House, filling the vacancy left by the passing of Tom Lantos. As Lessig notes, the other candidate in the primary is an exceptional politician, and he isn't considering the run because of any animus against her. I've no doubt they will work together as colleagues if she wins the primary. If he runs, and I suspect he will, it will be to fight against the corrupting influence of cash on politics. A political system where individual citizens giving small donation dominate the race for political office is a far better…

Market Analysis

There was a telling moment yesterday on the NYTimes.com website. It was just after 10:30 in the morning and the top of the site featured a breaking news article about the S&P 500 heading into higher territory. The article offered the usual litany of explanations, from better than expected news on housing starts to a surprising uptick in retail sales. But here's the catch: by the time I glanced at the article it was already obsolete, with the Dow and S&P down by a significant amount. A few hours later, a new article made its way to the top of the NYTimes site, explaining why the market…

On Food

Slacktivist talks about politics in Delaware, concluding: the state's governor-elect … ma[de] a shrewd, surprising and encouraging announcement of his own regarding his upcoming inaugural celebration: "Markell: Give time for your neighbors." Gov.-elect Jack Markell proposed an alternative to the traditional inaugural ball. No expensive gown or tux rentals necessary. But get ready to roll up those sleeves -- and the sooner, the better. Standing in the volunteers' room at the Food Bank of Delaware, Markell and Lt. Gov.-elect Matt Denn launched a fresh effort to help Delaware residents give…

Bones, museums, and First-Class Relics

Denyse "Buy my book" O'Leary thinks that evolutionary biologists are just like religious folk. Among the deep parallels she finds: Scientists and the religious both give booklets to children, celebrate birthdays of important figures, claim that certain things are facts, and seek official recognition. Finally: - sacred bones. Christian churches have the bones of the saints; Buddhist stupas the toe-nail-clippings of Buddha; evolution is built on sacred bones, that the evolutionists read meanings into in the way that the pagan priests of Caesar's time read meaning into scattered bones. What is…