Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Hopefully, this week, I’ll have time to post another in the Universal Common Descent series, and I just wanted to say a word or two about the importance of it.
First - it isn’t very important. In the grand scheme of things, it is certainly no-where near as important as the big things in [...]

I have stated before on this blog and in other contexts that universal common ancestry is “proven” by multiple lines of very strong evidence. I sometimes take it for granted that most people are at least dimly aware of this, even if they haven’t looked into the question personally in any depth. That is a [...]

Rare glimpse at the evolution of a complex new ability:
Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.
Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.
In the [...]

We’d all be dead.
Oh no! Wait! This is terrible news. I guess now that we’re all dead, biologists will never explain how our feet evolved the ability to stick to gravity!
But, seriously, folks… It’s pretty obvious that the line of reasoning that the producers of Expelled mangle so badly is the “fine tuning” argument, and [...]

It’s not as simple as we would like for it to be. And putting it under a microscope is an idea whose time has come…
There are so many money quotes in the linked article that I’m tempted to copy & paste the whole thing here. I know… my job is supposed [...]

I had seen this short video a while back and forgot where I had seen it and could not find my way back to it but I couldn’t ever get it off of my mind.
Lo and behold we cross paths again today and I am sticking this where I can watch it from time to time and [...]

Well, maybe you are.
With LRAD, you just aim it at a member of the crew, and have an interpreter “speak” to the sailor. It was noted that the guy on the receiving end was sometimes terrified, even after he realized it was that large American destroyer that was talking to him. This apparently gave the [...]

When you want to know something about converting somatic cells to pluripotent stem cells.

are endless!
This is the kind of thing that makes you glad that you are just an aging man with a high school education and a perpetual sense of wonder.

Food irradiation… the author in this case is a particle physicist, so he’s probably not talking out his hat.