When I was growing up, I read a lot of trash: comic books and Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance. I read them because I liked them, not because I had a list of Great Books I should be reading, and because of that, I grew up loving to read.
The title lies. Nothing can make sense of a cat. I don’t even know why I have a cat at home — I blame the brain parasites.
First, they tell you you’re wrong, the climate isn’t changing.
Then they tell you, well, it’s changing, but it’s entirely natural, and humans have nothing to do with it.
And finally when reality sinks in, they announce that it’s happening, humans cause it, but it’s ALL THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS FAULT.
We have officially reached stage 3. Carly Fiorina is blaming environmentalists for the severe California drought.
Zana’s granddaughter
Does the London Times routinely publish crackpot pseudoscience with no fact checking at all? I’ve just read their latest piece on the notorious Bryan Sykes, Bigfoot Hunter, and it’s the kind of gullible tosh I’d expect from a Murdoch tabloid. It’s got one paragraph that mentions that other scientists doubt his findings, but otherwise it’s a fluff piece for Sykes’ new book about an ape-woman…which is not only inane, but distressingly racist.
There’s this obsessed Bigfoot prof at Oxford — no, he’s not a Bigfoot at Oxford, he’s a professor at Oxford who claims to study Bigfoot — who’s treated as a serious guy by the London Times. He just got shot down by the science editor, though, who rolled his eyes at Syke’s “evidence” and also got a revealing quote from him.
Larry Moran quotes this closing paragraph from an actual, published paper in a respectable journal. I don’t understand what it means. Can somebody explain why these terms are mashed together in this way?
We close this essay by postulating that there has been a pervasive influence of the gene centrism inherent in the Modern Synthesis in conjunction with the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology on biomedical thinking. We believe that this influence has now become counterproductive. Thus, it is critical for new ideas stemming from evolutionary biology highlighted in this special issue of The Journal of Physiology and elsewhere to more fully inform biomedical thinking about the complex relationship between DNA and phenotype. The time has come to stop chasing Mendel.
All my Canadian friends are chattering about James Lunney right now, a member of parliament who resigned from his party because people were making fun of his deeply held and cherished beliefs…like his views on evolution.
It’s an interesting discussion, focusing on the famous The Spandrels Of San Marco paper, but also talking generally about SJ Gould’s ego (it was big and ambitious), and how to properly do an evolutionary research program.
