I have never had much respect for paleontology. It always angers me to see someone dig up a bone or two and claim to know what a dinosaur or "ape-man" looked like and how it behaved. The history of paleontology is full of frauds and ridiculous theories that were later overturned. So much of it is guesswork, and oftentimes the paleontologists jump ( Read more... )

Just as I don't usually like posting large book quotations instead of my own thoughts, so too, I don't usually like posting images. But as I did on Friday, I again make an exception.

The title of my entry refers to a previous entry of mine.[1] Cham captures some of this in a humorous comic form:


( Read more... )

(An aside regarding my previous post: I have returned and edited it for clarity. It was never my intent to say that I don't like babies because they are dumb. This is not true; I have no dislike of babies themselves. But because babies are dumb, it takes a lot of work to communicate with them to help them become smarter, and I'd rather avoid the ( Read more... )

If I ever (against very high odds to the contrary) have a genetically related child, I am going to definitely teach him or her sign language as early as I possibly can.

My good friend izaaksmom did this with her son I., and I have always been intrigued and impressed by this.

Part of the reason I have no desire for having my own genetic children is related ( Read more... )

Some of you may recall an entry of mine a few years ago in which I described research that shows that the dogma of biology that says that who we are comes primarily from our genes is lacking. A new field of "epigenetics" has been started to study changes in expression of genes as opposed to simply whether genes are there or not. (In other words, ( Read more... )

Apparently, President Obama made some comment in his inaugural address that he would "restore science to its rightful place."

Of course, I did not watch the inauguration; I only found out about this from a Facebook message from T.Gr., who posted about it on his blog, in which he cited the following article, written by Dennis Overbye:

http://www. ( Read more... )

Japanese researchers, at the end of 2008, reported in the science journal Neutron that they were able to reproduce approximations of what subjects were looking at by directly monitoring their brains with an MRI ( Read more... )

Like the woolly mammoth,[1] large chunks of the Neanderthal Man genome have been sequenced in recent years/months. The results show that we are more than 99.5 percent genetically similar to them. (For comparison, they have ten times fewer genetic differences than chimps do from us ( Read more... )

(I haven't done one of these flavor of entries in a while....)
I was having an interesting coffee discussion with two coworkers the other day who each reiterated something I've heard countless times from anti-religious folk -- a very negative view of faith, whether that be that it is foolish, stupid, or even evil ( Read more... )

Maybe I misunderstand the principle -- but this in part is because of its (mis)use -- but I am not a fan of Ockham's razor ( Read more... )