Not only do we learn where Tiktaalik came from, but we get an explanation for why the prayer study flopped!
Important efficacy tip: stash your porn in a lead-lined safe before praying.
My own daughter, a participant in the blogospheric War on Easter…where did I go wrong right?
The Folk Era was a special time in America, a time of innocence, when people sang Kumbaya and really meant it. When banjo music got airplay and Burl Ives had groupies. No one knows what caused the folk era, and scientists are studying what can be done to prevent it from ever happening again.
The nice people at royzimmerman.com have sent me another CD, The Best of the Foremen. They tell me this group was especially popular with biologists (I can see it—songs about wallowing in whale guts and what we euphemistically call “firing the Surgeon General” are always well received by us), and that SJ Gould had them play at his wedding. I can’t argue with Gould! Not any more at least.
Self-mocking folkies are always fun to listen to. Check ’em out.
Alas, I fear that if I let myself be bitten by a squid, all I’d get for my trouble is a very nasty infection, and possibly a few toxins.
Who would have thought these words would ever be typed by me? I’m looking forward to Ann Coulter’s new book.
It’s called Godless(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Apparently, Ann Coulter has written a book about me, although I suspect that she’ll instead be pretending that people like me are representative of the Democratic Party as a whole. I wish.
I’m sure it will be insightful, nuanced, and meticulously researched. Maybe Al Franken and I should get together in a summer book club to discuss it.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
Ann Coulter
P.S. Please don’t buy it. I’m not planning to, myself (although if the publisher wants to send me a review copy, I’ll gleefully read it and review it), but I just know my local library will be getting it.
P.P.S. I’m also amused at the image of Ann Coulter as an icon of Christian thought.
It feels like cartoon day on Pharyngula, but this one is so good I had to mention it. Tom Tomorrow takes on Saint Thomas DeLay.
Creationists are always carping about that darned methodological naturalism and how we don’t make room for supernatural explanations. How about if we make a deal: we’ll reserve the boring ol’ natural explanations for things like Tiktaalik, and the creationists can move on to bring their deep knowledge of the supernatural to bear on more relevant questions, like Divine Evolution? That should keep them occupied for a while.
A proscription on all transitional forms would make it far easier to load the Ark—it would have been empty!
P.S. If you’re completely baffled by the title, it refers to Woodmorappe’s infamous statistical error: calculating the feasibility of Noah’s Ark by estimating average animal size using the median instead of the mean.
Don’t watch it if you’d rather not hear how nonsensical that book is.
By the way, the biblical scholar they’ve got on there, Paul Meyer, is no relation, and he’s so darned wrong he doesn’t even know how to spell his name correctly.
The tetrapod isn’t surprising…you know you’re a science nerd when the first thing you wonder is what the flowering plants are doing in the Devonian. It also makes me wonder just how old Bob the Angry Flower is.
