Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, July 31

Just what your case of the Mondays needs:

• "Darwin has nothing to do with science....There's not a shred of evidence that Darwin was a scientist."

  Ben Cohen heard a guy on the radio claim that there was 'no evidence that Darwin was a scientist.' And he asks: What? What does that even mean? He is curious, intrigued, and a little bit weirded out.

• "Collaboration, competition, and turf wars"

  Janet Stemwedel's continuing coverage of the bouhaha over MIT professor Susumu Tonegawa's role in the decision not to hire job candidate Alla Karpova. Notes on life in "the snakepit" of academic science.

• "Ancient Rules for Bilaterian Development"

  PZ Myers on the evolutionary development of asymmetry: "I'd go so far as to suggest that one of the most important events in our evolutionary history was the basic one of taking a symmetrical ball of cells and imposing on it a coordinate system, creating positional information that allowed cells to have specific identities in particular places in the embryo."

• "What happens in bed, stays in bed"

  Men who suffer from sleep apnea also experience higher rates of erectile dysfunction.

• Biodefense Controversies

  A government facility under construction in Maryland, The National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), will conduct biological warfare research "within what many arms-control experts say is a legal gray zone."

• "Neurofeedback Wins World Cup!"

  OK, that might be a stretch. But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the Italian world cup team did use this method to sharpen their powers of concentration before the tournament.