jlynch | January 3, 2009
Every position of permanent agreement or harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle between reason and life - reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires. And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of religion.
From Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida (The Tragic Sense of Life) by the Spanish existentialist…
jlynch | January 3, 2009Some of you may already have seen this (for example, PZ has mentioned it), but Nature has put together a short PDF document that gives fifteen lines of "evidence for evolution by natural selection" [here]. Here's the list (stolen from PZ):
The discovery of Indohyus, an ancestor to whales.
The discovery of Tiktaalik, an ancestor to tetrapods.
The origin of feathers revealed in creatures like Epidexipteryx.
The evolution of patterning mechanisms in teeth.
he developmental and evolutionary origin of the vertebrate skeleton.
Speciation driven indirectly by selection in sticklebacks.
Selection…
jlynch | January 3, 2009
Carl Zimmer is presenting a series of posts by Ken Miller in which Miller takes on DI-flack Casey Luskin's attempt to claim that he misrepresented research regarding the evolution of clotting proteins when he gave testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover (way back in 2005).
See here and here. The third - and final - part will appear tomorrow apparently.
jlynch | January 3, 2009Today marks the fifth anniversary of the landing of NASA's Spirit on Mars. Its sibling, Opportunity, will celebrate five years on January 24th. Expected to last 90 days on the hostile Mars surface, as this article reminds us, they are still going strong and have been awoken after their winter hibernation.
Martian winds occasionally have cleared Spirit and Opportunity of suffocating dust, which was expected to coat their solar panels eventually and make them useless.
"So, that's part of the reason: darn good engineering and a little bit of luck," [Phil] Christensen said.
Phil Christensen is…
jlynch | January 2, 2009Over at the Panda's Thumb, Dave Wisker has (correctly) pointed out that members of the DI-funded Biologic Institute produced four papers in 2008:
D'Andrea-Winslow L, Novitski AK (2008) Active bleb formation is abated in Lytechinus variegatus red spherule coelomocytes after disruption of acto-myosin contractility. Integrative Zoology 3: 106-113. doi:10.1111/j.1749-4877.2008.00086.x
Axe DD, Dixon BW, Lu P (2008) Stylus: A system for evolutionary experimentation based on a protein/proteome model with non-arbitrary functional constraints. PLoS ONE 3: e2246. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002246…
jlynch | January 2, 2009Last year saw me present a mustelid every Monday. This year, I'm going to feature a member of the Felidae every Friday. In so doing, I will follow the taxonomy given in Wilson & Reeder's Mammal Species of the World.
Cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus Schreber 1775
Click for larger version. <source>
jlynch | January 1, 2009The coming year should be fairly productive. Here are what I hope to be the highlights for 2009:
Finish and submit three book reviews over the next few weeks
Finish some work for the History of Science Society's Committee on Education
Have a paper accepted by Pediatrics (more of that anon)
Teach my Origins, Evolution and Creation course for what must be the eleventh time (Spring)
Give a talk at the University of Oklahoma for their Darwin celebrations (February). This was the first of a number of invites I got to give a talk on February 12th and thus the one I accepted.
Give a four day…
jlynch | January 1, 20092009 is not just the Darwin Bicentennial, it is also the International Year of Astronomy. As APOD reminds us,
This year was picked by the International Astronomical Union and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization because it occurs 400 years after Galileo turned one of the first telescopes toward the heavens. Peering through that small window, Galileo discovered that the Moon has craters, Venus has phases, Jupiter has moons, and Saturn has rings.
ASU is hosting a series of events celebrating Darwin, and April will see a big symposium on origins, but I'm not…
jlynch | January 1, 2009It has become sort of a tradition for me to present an end-of-year roundup of the "achievements" of the intelligent design movement. Last year I noted that the IDists achieved even less than in the previous year, noting that they had achieved so little that I actually didn't blog much on ID. This year, it looks like they achieved even less and my statement from last year looks even more accurate:
Put bluntly, ID has not moved forward as a science one iota since this time last year. Depressing really. I mean, you'd like the opposition to at least try, otherwise the victories are just too…
jlynch | December 31, 2008Quoth Fuller:
But I happen to think that there is something more worth arguing about here, and a better way to think about the stakes is to ask, Suppose the matter of evidence remains unresolved or equally balanced: What difference does it make whether I endorse ID or Darwinism? Does it lead me to do science differently - in terms of the research questions chosen, the range of interpretations given to research results, as well as science's broader cultural significance? The answer to these questions seems to me to be clearly yes - and this is what the battle is about. Only some leftover…
jlynch | December 29, 2008Well it's official, Steve Fuller (see here, here, here and here) has officially joined the ID echo-chamber that is Uncommon Descent. He will, apparently, be arguing that "Darwinism is an undead 19th century social theory" indeed
stripped of its current scientific scaffolding, Darwinism is a 19th century social theory that has been turned into a 'general unified theory of everything', and as such belongs in the same category as Marxism and Freudianism. The big difference is that Marxism and Freudianism - throughout their existence - have been contested (many would say decisively) by several…
jlynch | December 28, 2008I have a dislike of hip-hop and rap. But when it is mixed with ID, well, I'm speechless. Witness Atom tha Immortal's silken rhymes:
Apocalyptic G-d presence/ Feeling the fire of G-d's essence/ You need Rosetta Stones to unlock my poem's message/ Born in a body of sand since early dawn/ Adam spawned genetic code of early on/ Written on the rocks of Hebron, The Earth Is Gone/ Reverted from an Information Age to Early Bronze/ Punishment of Civilization/ The only reason why this wicked nation ain't burning is G-d's patient/
Chorus: -----…
jlynch | December 22, 2008
This fashion maven and I wish all my readers a safe and peaceful holiday season. Be good to each other.
jlynch | December 22, 2008
European polecat, Mustela putorius L.
And with that, we end our series of Monday Mustelids which we began back in January.
jlynch | December 14, 2008
Siberian weasel, Mustela siberica Pallas 1773
There are no good available photos for the Malayan weasel (M. nudipes), the Black-striped weasel (M. strigidorsa) and the Egyptian weasel (M. subpalmata), so that's all you are getting on them. That means that next week's Monday Mustelid will be the last one in the series.
jlynch | December 12, 2008
AGRIPPA (A Book of The Dead) by William Gibson
I hesitated before untying the bow that bound this book together.
A black book: ALBUMS CA. AGRIPPA Order Extra Leaves By Letter and Name
A Kodak album of time-burned black construction paper
The string he tied Has been unravelled by years and the dry weather of trunks Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen Until they resemble cigarette-ash
Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite Now lost Then his name W.F. Gibson Jr. and something, comma…
jlynch | December 8, 2008
Black footed ferret, Mustela nigripes Audubon and Bachman, 1851
Least weasel, Mustela nivalis L.
Cute baby weasel under the fold ...
Least weasel pup, Mustela nivalis L.
I wasn't able to find a picture for the Indonesian mountain weasel (Mustela lutreolina Robinson and Thomas, 1917).
jlynch | December 7, 2008It's that time of the year again, the time to complete the end of year blog meme. Here is last year's entry. Rules are simple - post the first line of the first post for every month. I've omitted my Monday Mustelid, Today In Science and Friday Poem (semi-)regular posts, so it actually means this is the first post for December.
January: It's not like ASU did wonderfully against Texas (losing the Holiday Bowl 52-34), but at least they turned up to play somewhat (albeit not in the first quarter).
February: PZ has noted that the boyos over at Uncommon Descent have deep-sixed a comment thread…