I’m in Whyalla and I’m thinking about Neandertals. There’s a joke there somewhere if you’re a South Australian, but it isn’t actually a very fair one, or a very good one for that matter. So far, my day in Whyalla has been chock full of bright friendly people and even good food. That being said, [...]
Posts Tagged ‘evolution’
Wide eyed and new money with faded beauty queens
God, I hate the news media sometimes.
A story caught Dr. O’C’s eye in our local Murdoch owned fishwrapper the other day, the juicy lead of which was:
MODERN men have got it so good. According to scientific research, women are gradually becoming more attractive in an evolutionary ‘beauty race’.
Without reading either the article or the ’scientific research’, I issued [...]
Happy Big 200, Charlie D.
Were he biblical in his longevity, Charles Darwin would be 200 years old today. This year is also the 150th anniversary of his groundbreaking “Origin of Species”. I was listening to a Podcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered” the other day about the controversy still surrounding Darwin in the U.S. – a program which prompted [...]
Are you human or a dud?
Based on my students’ evaluations, I spent most of last semester boring them for a few hours every Monday morning. I was running short of material toward the end of the semester, so I started throwing in lectures about topics that interested me regardless of whether they were particularly relevant. One of these is human [...]
Weird Fishes and the Origin of Fingers
Getting in the middle of a scientific controversy is more dangerous than you might think. I have fond memories of a conference at which, under the influence of the product of yeast anaerobic sugar metabolim, I watched two well known professors very nearly come to blows over a question regarding the role of chromatin in [...]
Science Tuesday: Outside his window he sees the water that’s supposed to be clean
I’m running out of energy for political posts this election cycle and am on the verge of putting a moratorium on politics on A Free Man. But, I’ve had this one in the queue for some time and wanted to throw it out there before the ban. Today, I want to talk about science and [...]
Science Tuesday: Breath-taking insanity
The subtitle of this post my very well turn out to be “How I Alienated My Religious Readers” but I got a little something stuck in my craw while reading up for this week’s Science Tuesday. My last job, at Oxford, was working in a lab that focused on evolutionary developmental biology. This field of [...]
What You’re Saying