Conservapaedia, that bastion of idiocy got its arse handed to it when trying to pick fights with scientists over the Long Term Evolutionary Experiment . This is a multi-million generation breeding experiment involving bacteria, that turned up all sorts of interesting things, including some novel characters of the sort the average creationist ( Read more... )

There's a new paper on the origin of primates. Now I've not looked into primate evolution much (other than criticising the hype around some recent discoveries). But this seemed interesting. In a "Yer what?" way.

Michael Heads has calibrated the origin of the various primate groups to several tectonic events involved in the breakup of Pangaea.

New and ( Read more... )

Does anyone have access to November' 2009's Zoologica Scripta? I'd like a copy of the following paper please.

Michael Heads. Evolution and biogeography of primates: a new model based on molecular phylogenetics, vicariance and plate tectonics. Zoologica Scripta, 2009.

It suggests that lemurs and lorises diverged from the new and old-world monkeys ( Read more... )

OK. I admit it. I didn't vote. I had my ballot way in advance, I have a postal vote as I'm registered with my parents, rather than where I live at the moment. I'd even voted, put everything in the envelope, and had it in my bag ready to post. And I totally failed to actually send the damn thing off.

And then I discovered that If I had voted I'd ( Read more... )

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"Charles Darwin wasn't a scientist but a theologian ( Read more... )

Was really very good, but it did confirm my personal dislike for Ricky Gervais. However the host, Robin Ince was very, very good, with his Hannah-Barbera Feynman impressions, and humorous rants about Anne Coulter, Stephen Green and all the other people who provide a reason for the "New Atheists" to be so vocal. Plus he gave a shout-out to Tycho ( Read more... )

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Who does this woman have for a science advisor? Ken Hovind? I knew she was in favour of ID, I've heard the McCain rhetoric about the $3m "overhead projector" for a planetarium. Properly funding education for people with special needs is a very worthy aim. I don't doubt that the some of the "earmarked" pet projects aren't worth spending money on. ( Read more... )

Andrew Schlafly (Phyllis Schlafly's son) recently founded Conservap(a)edia. It is (as you might guess) an alternative to wikipedia because of the "liberal bias" it apparently has.

Dr. Richard Lenski is running the Long Term Evolutionary Experiment (LTEE). For the past 20 years he has been growing a culture of E. coli in a medium where glucose is  ( Read more... )

Some of you may have seen this paper at PLoS ONE. Its a rather nifty piece of work by Darren Naish and Mark Witton (who's very nice drawings accompany the article itself, and the various newspaper reports.)

Basically a group of pterosaurs called Azdarchids have always been a bit of a problem for palaeontologists working out their lifestyle. They're ( Read more... )

Imagine you've been given millions to make your film. It involves aliens. These aliens will be seen as non-moving prop remains, and live ones will be rendered in CGI. You therefore have free rein to make them look as weird as your imagination allows ( Read more... )