I think I despise anti-environmentalists as much as I do anti-evolutionists

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Ah, the libertarian extremists have found my site and are making comments. It’s a peculiar pathology that thinks environmentalism is an evil plot, that planning is communism/socialism, and that Jesus was a good capitalist. It is particularly irksome to try and deal with people who are so far gone that they deny science warning them of environmental dangers and impending problems.

How irksome? Imagine that a scientist and one of these deranged libertarian right-wing anti-environmentalist science deniers go out for a drive one day…

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Penis evolution

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After the recent struggles trying to keep up with the traffic on this site, you wouldn’t think I’d feel compelled to go trolling for more visitors, but isn’t that the nature of weblogging? The only point to it all is to rack up a bigger score than the next guy, as if we were playing pinball. So what’s a good ploy? As Lauren has cleverly pointed out, sex sells. And while it may be estrogen week, I’m going to buck the trend, since we all know what’s really important for weblog popularity: penises.

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Pufferfish and ancestral genomes

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The fugu is a famous fish, at least as a Japanese sushi dish containing a potentially lethal neurotoxin that was featured on an episode of The Simpsons. Fugu is a member of the pufferfish group, which have another claim to fame: an extremely small genome, roughly a tenth the size of that of other vertebrates. The genome of several species of pufferfish is being sequenced, and the latest issue of Nature announces the completion of a draft sequence for the green spotted pufferfish, Tetraodon nigroviridis, a small freshwater species.

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Hello from YearlyKos!

I’m here in sunny Las Vegas, hanging out in the lobby with the free wireless and watching all the funny blogger nerds with the orange badges walking by. Heh. Oh, hang on…I’m wearing an orange badge and blogging in a corner. Yeah, I’m such a nerd.

I don’t know how much time I’ll have for actually posting things here this weekend, but I’ve queued up a series of reruns to appear automagically at various times, so the site won’t be totally drying up. Half the liberal blogosphere seems to be here, so I’ve got to do something to keep a void from appearing.

How to evolve a vulva

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Creationists are fond of the “it can’t happen” argument: they like to point to things like the complexity of the eye or intricate cell lineages and invent bogus rules like “irreducible complexity” so they can claim evolution is impossible. In particular, it’s easy for them to take any single organism in isolation and go oooh, aaah over its elaborate detail, and then segue into the argument from personal incredulity.

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