[Note: This is the third of a four-part series

Part One: The Mystery of the Missing Chromosome (With A Special Guest Appearance from Facebook Creationists)

Part Two: The Mystery of the Missing Chromosomes, Continued: An Update From Your Preening Blogger

Part Four: And Finally the Hounding Duck Can Rest]

On Wednesday, I asked creationists for evidence. Over the past four days, I’ve been ordered to buy their book, offered it for free, invited to a debate and to guest blog. I’ve also been accused of lies and misdemeanors, of harassing innocent creationists, and of being a duck. Actually, a hounding duck. But I still haven’t gotten my answer.

There is, of course, a lesson here. Continue reading “Four Days of Fusion Chromosome Freak-Out” →

Here’s a video of a great talk about the evolution of whales that anatomist Joy Reidenberg gave at the recent PopTech conference. You may have seen her on the show Inside Nature’s Giants. Here’s my profile of Reidenberg this spring in the New York Times, in which I focused on what it’s like to take apart whales for a living.

Joy Reidenberg: Weird whales from PopTech on Vimeo.

Originally published July 20, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

[Note: This is the second of a four-part series:

Part One: The Mystery of the Missing Chromosome (With A Special Guest Appearance from Facebook Creationists)

Part Three: Four Days of Fusion Chromosome Freak-Out

Part Four: And Finally the Hounding Duck Can Rest]

Wow, what people will do to avoid answering your question.

Last night I started asking the people who run a creationist Facebook page for the evidence to back up a claim of theirs about evolution. I was told to buy their book. When I asked again, I got no response at all.

I ended up researching the latest on this particular aspect of human evolution–the fusion of two of our chromosomes millions of years ago–and wrote a blog post today.

This afternoon I got an email from the creationists.

Dear Carl,

I edit Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Views website. We’d be interesting [sic] in hosting an online debate between you and a contributor to Science and Human Origins. There are interesting issues to address and this is, I think, a much better format for that than Facebook. Please let me know if you’re agreeable in principle. If so, we can nail down a specific topic to debate and go over any further parameters. The format would be a simple point-counterpoint-point-counterpoint, with each post limited to 1000 words and focusing strictly on the ideas, not on personalities.

Best wishes,

David

I’m fairly sure that this is legitimate, because it comes from a discovery.org address, and because another Discovery Institute employee hinted at the same idea on the Facebook page.

I thought the question I asked was pretty simple. I wasn’t asking to hold a Lincoln-Douglas debate. I just asked what the evidence was for one of the claims made by the creationists.

Now it seems that in order to get that answer, I can either buy a book–which apparently is based on no peer-reviewed research of the authors, but just cherry-picked quotes from a ten-year old paper–or I can donate my time to write several thousands words for free for a creationist web site.

Making this offer even richer is Klinghoffer’s ground rules about focusing “strictly on the ideas, not on the personalities.” Klinghoffer himself has used Evolution News & Views to call people pathetic, a worthless bully, cowards, illiterate, and “a tyranny of the unemployed” (referring to Wikipedia editors). In one piece he wrote for Evolution New and Views, Klinhoffer mocked a post by a science blogger as “preening and self-congratulatory.”

That blogger happened to be me.

I will answer Mr. Klinghoffer publicly: no thanks. I never asked for a debate, and your arbitrary decrees, such as a mysterious thousand-word cutoff (my blog post on the chromosomes alone clocked in at over 2,000 words) make it even less appealing. I am particularly opposed to web sites that do not allow readers to comment. That’s how I ended up on Facebook in the first place–because the Discovery Institute’s web sites do not permit commenting. You, on the other hand, are more than welcome to leave a comment on my blog. My comment policy is very lax: I only throw out commenters who curse uncontrollably, hawk their own wares, or can’t stay on topic after repeated warnings. We have a thriving, fascinating discussion here, one from which I regularly learn new things from my readers. You might too.

Update: Klinghoffer confirms it was indeed he who emailed. He is also very tired of my asking the same question again and again, likening me to a duck. A preening duck, no doubt.

Originally published July 19, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

Last month I gave the keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. The society has just posted it on Youtube. I’ve cued it up below to the start of my talk, which came after some welcoming speeches at the start of the conference. In the spring, when the society asked me for a title for my talk, I called it “From Page to Pixel,” since it would be about the changes in science communication over the past decade. But then Chuck Norris came into my life, and things changed accordingly, as you’ll see…

Originally published July 12, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.