Remember Evolutionary Psychology? The theory?
It’s over.

It is often said that the human brain develops and improves up to a certain age, then becomes stagnant for a while, then slowly (or not so slowly) deteriorates over time. This is an old conception that developed before we knew that neural connections are being modified constantly, and that it is even the […]

This is a complicated and interesting story. Shirley Sherrod is an African American employee of the Ag Department who lost her job after she was attacked by Andrew Brietbart’s right wing tea-partying racist blog. In that blog post he showed video of Sherrod making a speech at an NAACP event, and as is […]

Is the Natural World a valid source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane areas of thought such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast?1 When it comes to airplanes, you’d better be a servant to the rules of nature (such as gravity) or the airplane […]

I’m going to repost a one year old version of this particular “falsehood” as is. My plan is to rewrite this post in connection with an upcoming edition of my random installment “Everything you know is sort of wrong” on Skeptically Speaking. But for now, I thought I’d just get it out and […]

Especially for Teachers
Teachers Under Fire
Is Blood Ever Blue? Science Teachers Want to Know!
Teachers Gone Wild

Resources (documents)

Bill Foster’s Letter
The Grubbs and Gibbs Memorandum: Require A Religious Reading of the Evolutionary Record in Public Schools

Education and Public Science: Creationism, Intelligent Design, Home Schooling
The Myers - Rue Debate And Why They Had to Taser Me
The Bible-Thumping Grinch […]

It is generally assumed that if a woman breast feeds, she will experience enhanced or more rapid than normal breast ptosis (that’s science for breast “sagging”). Phear of Ptosis is often cited as a possible reason to either not breast feed, or a reason to stop breast feeding sooner than otherwise ideal. (I quickly […]

Please visit my new blog at Sciencblogs.com.
The post you are looking for is there.
(It is also here, but I’d prefer it if you visited the new place!)

I’m pretty sure Amanda and I were abducted by aliens this morning. This is not the first time, for me. I was abducted with two others about 20 years ago in Southern Maine while looking for antiques, back when you could still get them cheap even in antique stores (inexpensive antiques, not aliens). […]

Have a look at this short piece in Wired:
“People who aren’t, or at least do not appear to be, eugenicists are claiming that intelligence testing is showing a strange difference in IQ between those of different ancestries,” commented Phil in response to the most recent WiSci post on the race-and-intelligence debate stirred by James Watson’s […]

A local story that may be of broader interest. From the Star Tribune (BBS) October 23, 2007:

Rabies kills Monticello man bitten by bat
By Joy Powell, Star Tribune
Randy Hertwig of Monticello swatted at the bat that flew around the cabin porch, and he felt only a pinprick on his hand that day in mid-August. There […]

St. Bernard Dog
I woke up this morning to see headlines such as the following in my newsreader:
Study Casts Doubt on Creationism … and St. Bernard Study Casts Doubt on Creationism….
It turns out that the shape of the dog’s head has evolved over time, and that this can only be explained […]

WTF? If a Democratic president did the equivalent about some sweetie-cakes Republican issue, s/he’d be impeached.
Today, Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the “Human Impacts of Global Warming.”…
CDC officials are now revealing that the White House […]

Photo from NASA. Click here to get the 2.27 megabyte version!
Ten large fires rage across southern California in this true-color Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image taken on October 27, 2003 by NASA’s Aqua satellite. Starting in the north, the first cluster of red dots is a combination of the Piru, Verdale, and […]

Click on the thumbnail to see the squiggles up close.
PNAS has a study (in an Open Access article) using Lake Malawi cores to indicate very severe arid conditions at times between 135 and 75 thousand years ago. The arid periods jive, more or less, with Milankovitch forcing patterns (see this for information […]