Oh, boy. The Intelligent Design creationists are all excited about a new paper that purports to have identified an intelligent signal in the genetic code. Here’s a new paper that can be added to the growing stack of intelligent-design articles in peer-reviewed journals. Even though the authors do not use the phrase “intelligent design,” their …
Category Archive: Evolution
Mar 13 2013
What I taught today: molecular biology of bat wings
My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles’ Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Biology~ Hard to believe, I know, but this class actually hangs together and has a plan. …
Mar 06 2013
What’s Jimmie Walker’s favorite arthropod?
“TRI-LO-BIIITE!” Oh, no, that was a terrible opening. You’ll only know what the heck I’m talking about if you remember JJ from the television show Good Times, and it’s such a pathetic joke it’s only going to appeal to grade schoolers. So if you’re a time-traveling 8 year old from the 1970s, you’ll appreciate the …
Feb 22 2013
ENCODE gets a public reaming
I rarely laugh out loud when reading science papers, but sometimes one comes along that triggers the response automatically. Although, in this case, it wasn’t so much a belly laugh as an evil chortle, and an occasional grim snicker. Dan Graur and his colleagues have written a rebuttal to the claims of the ENCODE research …
Feb 19 2013
Show your work, @JoseCanseco!
The baseball player Jose Canseco made a remarkable series of tweets yesterday. I may not be 100% right but think about it. How else could 30 foot leather birds fly?The land was farther away from the core and had much less gravity so bigness could develop and dominateMy theory is the core of the planet …
Feb 06 2013
Finally! My own personal time machine!
I’ve been playing with it for a while. It turns out that when you go back to Cretaceous Morris, you need to be able to swim really well, but Cambrian Morris is high and dry on a fairly small landmass (whoa, but oxygen is way down and carbon dioxide way up). You can have your …
Feb 06 2013
Mother’s Curse
It’s a harsh world for us men. Oh, sure, we’ve got all the political and economic power, and we’ve got most of the guns, but step into a senior citizens’ center and you’ll notice the preponderance of elderly women. Men die younger, on average. I’m also acutely aware of the growing disparity as we get …
Feb 05 2013
Give that fish a hand!
I have a bit of a peeve with a common analogy for the human genome: that it is the blueprint of the body, and that we can find a mapping of genes to details of our morphological organization. It’s annoying because even respectable institutions, like the National Human Genome Research Institute, use it as a …
Feb 04 2013
Only a bird
Another feathered dinosaur has been found in China, prompting Ken Ham to dig in his heels and issue denials. Yet another supposed “feathered dinosaur” fossil has come to light, again in China. (Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, AiG–U.S., reported on another Chinese fossil of a supposed feathered dinosaur in April 2012) Now, one headline described the fossil …
Jan 25 2013
The present is the past, the past is the present
Ken Ham is preaching about what science is again. He’s accusing the secular activist Zack Kopplin of being “brainwashed” by evolutionist propaganda, and to support this claim, he once again drags out the tired proposition that there are two kinds of science, historical and observational, and that only the observational kind is valid; well, unless …








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