One more test post

If you’re an email subscriber (Hi Mom), you may have noticed that the links in the emails that accompany new Fierce Roller posts have been linking to old Pharyngula posts for a while now. The problem was that the links were of the form https://freethoughtblogs.com/?p=4279 instead of https://freethoughtblogs.com/fierceroller/?p=4279. With some help from WordPress chat support, I believe that problem is now fixed. Hopefully the email accompanying this and future posts will include the right links.

What’s a DOI?

Whenever possible, I try to link to a publicly accessible version of any scientific article I report on. Sometimes this is on ResearchGate, sometimes on an author’s academic website, sometimes even a course website. The benefit is that anyone can download and read the article; the downside is that these links sometimes disappear. Publishers issue takedown notices, academics change institutions, and courses end.

For these reasons, I usually provide, in addition to a publicly accessible link, a link that I can count on to not disappear (these appear at the end of the post, under “Stable Links”). Almost always, these are DOIs. DOIs are Digital Object Identifiers, persistent handles that are permanently assigned to particular documents. Almost all academic journals assign DOIs to all of their articles (Evolutionary Ecology Research is one exception, much to my annoyance), as do the preprint servers arXiv and bioRxiv and the digital data archive Dryad.

[Read more…]

Jonathan Wells debunks something nobody believes

Black bear

Black bear, Glacier National Park, September 2014.

Charles Darwin speculated that whales might have evolved from bears. He was wrong, but then he didn’t have the benefit of molecular sequence data, detailed morphological comparisons, and sophisticated methods of phylogenetic inference. We’ve known for at least 50 years that cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) are most closely related to ungulates, specifically even-toed ungulates (artiodactyls). The current consensus is that the closest living relatives of cetaceans are hippopotamuses. Not everyone agrees with this specific relationship, but no one really doubts that whales are closely related to ungulates.

You wouldn’t learn that from reading Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells’ recent post, “From Bears to Whales: A Difficult Transition.”

[Read more…]

A is for Algae

I got my copy of Jillian Freese’s A is for Algae earlier this week. Freese, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rhode Island, says the book is “Part birthday gift. Part #scicomm. Part stress relief.” It’s full of watercolor paintings of algae, mostly seaweeds but with some phytoplankton as well. Each species (one for each letter of the alphabet) is presented with its scientific name, usually a common name, habitat and biogeographic information, and some interesting factoids.A is for Algae

Warning: spoilers below the fold.

[Read more…]