In The Evolutionists Richard Morris tells the tale of the disputes between Stephen Jay Gould & company and the “orthodox” Neo-Darwinians (J.M. Smith, Richard Dawkins, etc.). In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea Daniel Dennett comes very close to accusing Gould of being a closet theist. On this blog we do take our pot shots at Gould. Often […]

Carl Zimmer comments on the return of the Flores remains while John Hawks floats his idea that the “Hobbits” are australopithecenes. Posted by razib at 09:04 PM

A semi-follow up of the Larry Summers controversy, Women in Physics Match Men in Success. The article notes that: The proportion of women earning bachelors and PhDs in physics has been increasing.Women who receive their bachelors have just as much success in getting into the PhD, and later academic, track, as men.There is considerable international […]

For anyone who has read the transcript of Larry Summers’ speech it’s obvious that his persecutors have taken offense, not at the substance of his comments, but at their own interpretations of his comments. I liken their attacks and mock offense to that of this lady who claimed that eating a banana was a racist […]

Gender info on P.Z. Myers’ blogroll excluding “The Progressive Alliance”: Field Male Female Other %Male %Female %Other Aggregate Totals Feminists 0 9 0 0% 100% 0% 9 Academics 13 18 6 35.1% 48.6% 16.2% 37 Educators 7 4 1 58.3% 33.3% 8.3% 12 Doctors 9 5 2 56.3% 31.3% 12.5% 16 Others 31 7 15 […]

A study by nutritionists, reported at the current conference of the AAAS, shows that vegetarian diets can damage children’s health. See here for a news report. (Search Google News for the name ‘Lindsay Allen’ for more coverage.) But the most interesting part of the study is that it followed the effects of giving dietary supplements […]

A new study by Dacher Keltner has shown that Americans and Brits smile differently. From an article in Sunday’s Times Online >> While we British smile by pulling our lips back and upwards and exposing our lower teeth, Americans are more likely simply to part their lips and stretch the corners of their mouths. So […]

Quite a lot of discussion on Gene Expression has revolved around the modular nature of the human brain. Now, I know very little about neurology, but I do have extensive experience with at least one data point, and I do know something about modules: they feature prominently in my profession. So I would like to […]

SCSUScholars points to this job vacancy posting at St. Cloud State University. Assistant Professor of Human Relations & Multicultural Education-Probationary Responsibilities: Human Relations and Multicultural Education is an interdisciplinary department that emphasizes student-centered pedagogy and examines the impact of power, resources, cultural standards, and institutional policies and practices on various groups in our society. Responsibilities […]

Recent Origin and Cultural Reversion of a Hunter–Gatherer Group. The authors offer compelling genetic evidence that a particular “Hill Tribe” of Thailand which practices hunter-gathering might be descended from a very small founder population that originated among agriculturalists. Though Henry Harpending will know know more about this, I have read that the San of the […]

“Evolving to Eat Mush”: How Meat Changed Our Bodies. This article interviews researchers who argue on the one hand that we are optimized to process and utilize fat and cholesterol in our diet (via meat consumption), and another who suggests that cooking our already tender foods and cutting them up with tools released functional constraints […]

Stabilizing selection “acts” against change by favoring intermediate phenotypes.1 Many suspect that this is the stasis that Niles Eldgridge and Stephen Jay Gould noticed in the fossil record and serves as a central element in their theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. It is important to note that selection is still operative, it simply reduces the fitness […]

Today’s Sunday Times (London) has an amusing article (here) by Rod Liddle about what you can and can’t say on certain subjects. Which doesn’t stop him saying it… Posted by David B at 04:48 AM

…or, what the #*!@% is wrong with paleoanthropologists?! From Saturday’s Guardian >> “History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud” It appeared to be one of archaeology’s most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old – and was the vital […]

My post ruminating on post-humanism generated many comments. There were a lot of great informed speculations, and at 160+ comments it stayed shockingly on topic. But, I didn’t really get involved in the nitty-gritty of projecting exactly the path that the technological explosion will take in the next century. There are so many options, so […]

Remember the 1960′s marionette shows Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet? I guess the general consensus is that the Hollywood Thunderbirds remake sucked if you were older than 12, but I’ve seen the first two CGI episodes of Captain Scarlet, and man, they rock. If you’ve got Real Player you can watch the Captain Scarlet Trailer. Here […]

The DutchReport, a blog from Holland, reports that in response to death threats from Islamist extremists, Geert Wilders is being housed, not in a well-guarded safe house, but in the same prison that held the Lockerbie terrorists. Almost as bad is that Hirsi Ali has been forced to live in a Marine barracks in Amsterdam. […]

We seem to be on a Sweden kick of late, so let me continue the trend with a few more links of interest, these mainly dealing with immigration problems. Here is a clip from Swedish TV about a Fox report about Malmö’s immigrant problem. Here is a lengthy article entitled A Swedish Dilemma. Here is […]

Visitors to London should know that the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons has recently reopened after several years of restoration. For the first time it is open to the public without appointment (free of charge). Further details are here. Note that there is no separate entrance to the museum: you have to […]

The Mercury News ran an interesting article (registration required) yesterday titled, “Gene researchers find variations by ancestry.” It describes a new paper published in Science by David Hinds, et al, describing DNA variation between three human populations. And [surprise!] the paper is astonished to see that the researchers believe that race (the term “human populations” […]