Tag: evolution
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Cephalopods, from head to foot, part 1: Let There Be Squid
Small language joke there… Cephalopods–octopi, squid, cuttlefish, nautiluses, and a few others–are fascinating. They are likely the smartest invertebrates on this planet, and are probably bright enough to give many vertebrates a run for their money. But they are also, at least compared to us and what we are familiar with, *profoundly* alien. This was…
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Creationism: a rant
Or, why creationists bug the ever-loving *snot* out of me (I try to avoid swears). The world is amazing and fascinating and wonderful and terrifying and silly and awe-inspiring. I think anyone who isn’t at least occasionally in awe of the everyday miracles around us is seriously missing out. And science is our primary tool…
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Beneficial mutations
One thing creationists like to harp about is the idea that mutations are always, inherently, bad. But, well, they’re not. Mutations are, basically, copying errors in DNA. There are lots of different kinds, from effectively invisible ones that don’t actually change any proteins to losses or duplications of entire large chunks. Now, it is true…
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Humans: not just squishy brownish-pink things.
A lot of people have this mistaken impression that humans, without tools, are basically helpless in nature. That we’re basically just squishy and useless, and without tools we wouldn’t stand a chance in the wild of either finding food, or avoiding becoming food. Now, it’s broadly true that the average human from a Western country…
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This is a bad argument. Please don’t make it.
In the “debate” over Evolution (please note, I’m not talking legitimate scientific debate over things like steady-state vs punctuated equilibrium, but the general cultural debate over whether evolution is real or not), there is a bad argument that I’ve seen, oddly enough, by both “sides”. Just to state my biases here, I’m a theist, who…
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Lamarck was (a little bit) right
Most people know about Darwin. He’s the guy (well, one of the guys, but at least arguably the first) who figured out that evolution happened basically by everything having too many babies, then the ones with the most useful characteristics (for a given environment) surviving long enough to have babies of their own. There have…
Science is Really Weird 