The paddlefish is a surreal giant, with a spatula-shaped nose that some scientists believe it uses to sense the electric fields of its prey, which it sucks up like a whale. You might not think of it as an animal that has much to offer in our quest to understand ourselves. But in fact, underneath the glaring differences, paddlefish and humans share some surprising similarities. And those similarities are precious clues to how our distant ancestors evolved hands and feet.
Category: Blog
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, let me quickly recap (and then, at your leisure, read this post.) Last November, my article on the evolution of complex features came out in National Geographic. A few weeks later the article inspired a long but baseless attack from the Discovery Institute, an outfit that promotes intelligent design (a k a “the progeny of creationism”). The attack, authored by one Casey Luskin, came in three parts, climaxing in an argument for intelligent design that required me to wire my jaw back shut: “Was the Ford Pinto, with all its imperfections revealed in crash tests, not designed?”
Continue reading “Once More Into the Flaming Pinto, My Friends!”
Jennifer Jacquet at SB blog Shifting Baselines just returned from the Galapagos, where she got the feeling that blogging has not made much of an impact, even among the scientists at the research stations. It left her wondering if science blogging is mainly restricted to the so-called “First World”–i.e., affluent places such as the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan. If true, that would be a shame, since it is potentially such a powerful tool for getting scientific information, no matter where you are in the world.
Continue reading “A Call to Bloggers Around the World: How First-World-O-Centric Are We?”
Why don’t I blog more? In part because I’m busy reading other blogs. I finally got around to adding some of my favorite science blogs outside the scienceblogs.com empire to the blogroll over on the left side. Allow me to take a moment to introduce you to them.
The Anti-Toxo: A blog about every new paper or article on Toxoplasma, the resident parasite here at the Loom. If you want to understand our parasitic overlords, this is a must read.
Center for Science Writings Blog. John Horgan, veteran science writer, now runs the Center for Science Writing at Stevens Institute of Technology. Lots of good stuff on the blog.
I just wanted to take a moment to reiterate my longstanding policy on comments. I reserve the right to delete comments that are slanderous, obscene, or glaringly off-topic. I also reserve the right to ban commenters who do not follow these rules even after being reminded of them. Anyone who accepts these simple rules is welcome to tell me why I am utterly wrong about the topic at hand, even if you think the world is six thousand years old. (And I am entitled to comment on why you are wrong, too.) But this is not the place for spam-like manifestos.
Let the conversation resume.