Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist and science communicator. His research has covered North American prehistoric and historic archaeology and African archaeology and human ecology. He is an OpenSource and OpenAccess advocate. Greg's wife, Amanda, is a High School biology teacher, his daughter Julia is a world traveler and his son Huxley is 2.
PZ Myers notes that Ken Miller is making a case for the term design in evolutionary biology. Miller simply claims that "design" comes from the usual, expected evolutionary processes (Natural Selection, etc.). PZ is not buying this bill of goods, and neither am I. One way to address this question…
In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of…
And they are paying for it.
Google is funding work to ensure the Windows version of Adobe Systems' Photoshop and other Creative Suite software can run on Linux computers.
For the project, Google is funding programmers at CodeWeavers, a company whose open-source Wine software lets Windows software…
"We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn't find any mistakes."
A team of…
Plan B is, of course, inserting Christian Creationism into the Social Studies curriculum. This is disconcerting. Many otherwise perfectly rational and intelligent people think this is a good idea. It is not.
This sort of proposal is becoming more common now (this week) in editorials and other…
"The Wedge Strategy" refers to a document (the Wedge Document) developed by the Discovery Institute in 1998 and leaked by Tim Rhodes in 1999. It outlines a strategy to insinuate a specific subset of Christian Fundamentalism into the public education system. Although Wedge Proponents have denied…
This is the February 20, 2008 edition of The Tangled Bank web carnival. The next edition will be hosted at Archaeoporn.
Behavioral Ecology Blog
Thinking like an economist (about Parent-Offspring Conflict)
Published in 1974, this paper is arguably Bob Trivers 2nd most influential paper behind the…
Everyone knows about Darwin's Finches, of the Galapagos Islands. But of course, Darwin made observations of birds throughout his travels on The Beagle. Here, I present a number of passages from The Voyage that include some of these observations.
Struthio Rhea
I will now give an account of ... the…
A good trick in child psychology is to come to a "compromise" in which the child, not knowing any better, gets what they think they wanted but it really turns out to be cod liver oil after all. Florida creationists got their cod liver oil when the Florida School Board voted, with a worrisome 4-3…
Despite having only a couple of beers, I'm a little fuzzy this morning, but I do want to give a short update last night's Cafe Scientifique at the Bryant Lake Bowl (sponsored by the Bell Museum of Natural History).
First, thanks to everyone for coming, and I'm truly sorry for those of you (Mike,…
Fidel Castro Will Step Down SundayCuba's ailing leader Fidel Castro has announced he will not accept another term as president, ending the communist revolutionary's 49 years in power.
[Details: BBC]
Greg Is Doing a Cafe Scientifique...
"Evolution, Cuisine and Romance"
This Tuesday at the Bryant-Lake Bowl
February 19, 7 p.m.
The Bell Museum Blurb says:
Were the opposable thumb, an upright stance and a large brain were the most important evolutionary events in human history? According to…
Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can't find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record, than changes in preferred food strategies…
Comparing living chimpanzees to living humans, in reference to the species that gave rise to these two closely related species, is one way to frame questions about the evolution of each species.
Generally, it is useful to address evolutionary questions by comparing two living species with the…
Charles Darwin wrote a book called Geological Observations on South America. Since Fitzroy needed to carry out intensive and extensive coastal mapping in South America, and Darwin was, at heart, a geologist more than anything else (at least during the Beagle's voyage), this meant that Darwin would…
Science Debate 2008 always was a liberal, Democratic Party leaning effort, but it might be the case that it has now become a perfectly partisan past time with no further relevance. I hope not, but I fear this may be true.
Science debate 2008 is an effort by a number of scientists and friends of…
The fair was this weekend. I was in the vicinity of Har Mar, but only briefly, and I did not have time to stop in this weekend. But The Lorax did, and he has blogged about it here.
Here are a couple of my earlier posts on this event, including last years:
Twin Cities Home Schooling Creationist…
Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting…
We are only a tiny ways through the voyage. Need to hurry up! So, let's skip ahead a bit and hit the Gauchos.
Well, you don't really want to hit at Gaucho ... they hit back rather hard....
The Gauchos are the cowboys of the so-called Southern Cone and Pampas. The Gauchos are a Latin American…
