Jan 22 2013
Eugene McCarthy, the author of that crackpot stabilization theory, has discovered my review and is now making a noise on twitter. He’s gone from thanking me profusely for mentioning him, to whining that I stole his figures, to complaining that I don’t understand his theory at all, all in the last 24 hours. But here’s …
Jan 14 2013
Share it with your kids: this is a clean and simple summary of evolution. (via Skepchick.)
Jan 08 2013
We need a lot more of these. Check out Little Changes by Tiffany Taylor.
Dec 30 2012
Biologist Carl Woese has died of pancreatic cancer at age 84: Carl and his colleagues wrote two papers published in 1977 that overturned a universally held assumption about the basic structure of the tree of life. They reported that the microbes now known as Archaea were as distinct from bacteria as plants and animals are. …
Dec 11 2012
This is another addition to my αEP series about evolutionary psychology. Here’s the first, and unfortunately there are several more to come. By the way, people are wondering about the α in the title. Don’t you people do any immunology? α is standard shorthand for “anti”. I mentioned in the last one this annoying tendency …
Dec 10 2012
This is another addition to my αEP series about evolutionary psychology. Here’s the first, and unfortunately there are several more to come. I have a real problem with evolutionary psychology, and it goes right to the root of the discipline: it’s built on a flawed foundation. It relies on a naïve and simplistic understanding of …
Dec 03 2012
I thought poutine was poutine until I visited Canada and every single person at the restaurant ordered a different kind. Larry Moran and I were caught in the act; also, he reviews my talk.
Nov 24 2012
Larry Moran put up this video of Elisabeth Lloyd discussing the problem of assuming adaptation in evolutionary studies. I think it’s excellent and makes points I wish more people would consider…but strangely, most of the comments over there are expressing extreme distaste while failing to mention any specifics about what they dislike. Maybe some of …
Nov 23 2012
Earlier, when I was writing up that criticism of Rybicki and Stangroom, I read through that article on shopping and foraging and evolution that he had cited in defense of his views. There was something in it that drove me to distraction and made me want to find a match and light the whole paper …
Nov 20 2012
A while back, two physicists, Paul Davies and Charles Lineweaver, announced their explanation for cancer with a novel theory, which is theirs, that cancers are atavisms recapitulating in a Haeckelian reverse double backflip their premetazoan ancestry. They seemed very proud of their idea. I was aghast, as you might guess. They even claimed that human …
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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
Chris Clarke is a science and natural history writer, editor, and
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