Output Stream of Consciousness

Despite all the labels and posturing and rationalizations, when it comes down to why evolution is a particular target for many of the Christian (as well as Jewish and Muslim, though we hear less of those perspectives here), it is relatively simple, and… more »

I have a small passel of graphology books. They were fun, especially when I was younger and wanted to see whether my peculiarities of handwriting were "good" or "bad", and was indeed happy with the bevy of "good" signs. Revisiting the craft, though,… more »

They are normally fairly timely with moderating comments over on the Expelled! movie blog but, unusually, the moderation has been out of commission there for over a week and a half so far. Now it could be that there is just one guy and he went on… more »

Based on the misrepresentations in the Expelled! movie, reason tells me that a unilaterally positive review is liable to partake of a number of factual inaccuracies in the movie, and add its own bad conclusions. Well, one out of one so far. In a… more »

From a more recent episode of the "Why do people laugh at creationists?" series, Stein is shown being interviewed by Paul Crouch, Jr. on Trinity Broadcasting Network. The episode is here. Now, a lot of this particular episode is not all that… more »

I've been a little preoccupied answering and posing questions over on the Expelled! blog. It's a blog related to the upcoming movie, Expelled!, which purports to show how "mean Big Science" is "unfairly oppressing" "noble truth-seeking Intelligent… more »

If discoveries with the advance of time have taught us anything, it's that despite how special humans are, we have been removed from occupying front and center stage of the entire universe. The corollary of this is that if you look into the universe and… more »

The site DNA seen through the eyes of a coder is a pretty decent introduction to how DNA and some of the surrounding processes work. Some things are a little hard to make analogies for - it doesn't go much into good analogies for proteins and protein… more »

We've been drilling it into people over and over again: "it's just a theory" is wrong when we say Theory of Evolution because Theory in scientific terms means well-proven hypothesis, not just some random guess, and that's true for things like evolution… more »

Every now and again, you run into a really odd fact in biology. An interesting but tame one is the fact that we also run through multiple different kinds of globin in our hemoglobin (we're done with Hba-x, or "zeta globin", for example, by the end of… more »

It sounds like something right out of an old Saturday Night Live skit, but fecal transplants are real honest-to-goodness medical techniques for use, for example, when antibiotics have knocked out everything except the really nasty bacteria. CBC covered… more »

Now that is a heck of a mouthful of a word. It's the field of application of the theory of evolution to drug discovery. Now it's not a matter of making things evolve, but rather taking advantage of the effects of common ancestry and the gene and… more »

There is a site that summarizes many of the proteins that creatures have in common with one another. Most of the creatures listed are bacteria, but there are a few multicellular organisms with respective codes: Microsporidia [E], thale cress [A], a worm… more »

So you want to see a little bit of the tree of life for yourself. Maybe use some of the bioinformatics tools on the Internet to see some of the relatedness of life on earth. Can you do that as a layman? Sure you can, and here's a little introduction as… more »

A commenter at one of the blogs I frequent pointed out in passing this one very cool paper from January 2006 called HOX GENES: Seductive Science, Mysterious Mechanisms in the Ulster Medical Journal. I love the Hox, or homeobox genes. There aren't too… more »