Larry Moran discusses Carl Zimmer’s latest piece for Science on the origin of eukaryotes: This is well-timed since it appears just when I’ve returned from a meeting on this very topic. [Go here if you can’t see the article on the Science website.] One of the things we learned at the meeting is that the… Continue reading

“Google waits in watch of dishonesty…” I don’t read the Huffington Post, but Barrett Brown’s takedown of William Dembski is one of the best: * In conjunction with his friends at the pro-ID Discovery Institute, Dembski decided to commission a Flash animation ridiculing Judge John Jones, the Bush-appointed churchgoer who, despite being a Bush-appointed churchgoer,… Continue reading

Sean Carroll makes a lot of sense: My own goal is not really changing people’s minds; it’s understanding the world, getting things right, and having productive conversations. My real concern in the engagement/mockery debate is that people who should be academic/scholarly/intellectual are letting themselves be seduced by the cheap thrills of making fun of people.… Continue reading

Larry Kudlow goes out on a limb: Even today, as unfashionable as it sounds, and given Washington’s attack on horsepower, Americans are still in love with automobiles. They still like going to showrooms, checking out the new models, inhaling the great new-car smell, and yes, kicking the tires and making a buy. Cars may no… Continue reading

Every once in a while, PZ Myers stops beating the drum and remembers he’s a scientist: We miss something important when we just look at the genome as a string of nucleotides with scattered bits that will get translated into proteins — we miss the fact that the genome is a dynamically modified and expressed… Continue reading