Rick Perry’s on board! And no postmodern vagueness for him. He’s here to tell us that intelligent design is a “valid scientific theory.” That’s right, governor. Just check out all the work on intelligent design going on in the biology department at your state’s fine university. Um…wait…it’s there somewhere. Just let me figure out how to work this search function…
(Hat tip to Panda’s Thumb.)
Originally published January 6, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.
As the proud owner of a fine cat, Tino, I’m happy to join the ritual of cat-blogging. I was inspired after reading a new study that sorts out Tino’s kinship with other cats. Now I know that a cheetah is more closely related to Tino than it is to a leopard (right and left, respectively).
The evolution of cats has been a tough nut to crack. While it’s no great mental feat to tell the difference between Tino and a tiger, it’s not so easy to figure out exactly which species are most closely related to domesticated cats and which are more distant relatives.
…to this gem I just received about my post on the Dover creationism case:
Carl,
It doesn’t bother you that the judge went beyond any human capacity to attack the board members, not for their actions, not for their efforts to remove science fiction from the science classroom (that would be a realistic description of Darwinian evolution as it is fictional and not factual), but rather because he stated they were trying to introduce religion into the classroom.
The New York Times, January 3, 2006
Why, Michael Lynch wants to know, don’t we look like bacteria?
Evolutionary biologists generally agree that humans and other living species are descended from bacterialike ancestors. But before about two billion years ago, human ancestors branched off.
This new group, called eukaryotes, also gave rise to other animals, plants, fungi and protozoans. The differences between eukaryotes and other organisms, known as prokaryotes, are numerous and profound. Dr. Lynch, a biologist at Indiana University, is one of many scientists pondering how those differences evolved.
Continue reading “From Bacteria to Us: What Went Right When Humans Started to Evolve?”
Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4 pm EST I’ll be a guest on Science and Society, an online radio show. You can listen live or visit the site later for a podcast. I’ll do my best to be interesting on all things evolutionary, but fortunately I’m sandwiched between two scientists who should be definitely worth a listen: Steven Salzberg, who has sequenced the genomes of humans and flu viruses and just about everything in between, and Zach Hall, the president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which was set up to make California the world’s envy in stem cell research.