Neandertal mDNA and Sample Sizes

John Hawks takes it down:
Now, let’s consider the question: Can we predict anything about Neandertal evolution and relationships based on this small, possibly unrepresentative sample of mtDNA?
The answer is that it doesn’t matter very much whether we have 5 sequences or 500. If 15 out of 15 specimens from different sites across Europe preserve a [...]

Who Needs a Compass When You’ve Got a Cow?

Do cows point north?  That is the question.

Joe Biden Interview

An interview with Joe Biden from 2004.  Not bad.
B: Yeah, let me make this final point. The irony of the neoconservatives’ exercise of power is, I genuinely believe, unrelated to terror, they weakened us. The very thing they anticipated has had the opposite result. They anticipated the leveraging of power would chasten North Korea, Iraq, [...]

Dead Heat: McCain vs. Obama

Last nights speech by Hillary Clinton was very impressive and may have been the best speech I’ve heard her give during the campaign.  Monday nights speech by Michelle Obama was likewise very good and helped bring her to life for more of the public that may not have heard her speak all that much up [...]

USSR Big, Iran Small … Uga … Booga …

Ezra explains the details to McCain:

For a Good Time, Call a Creationist

The great divide:
That’s pretty much how I view hanging out with creationists. For a while we can sit down together, discuss big questions, and be generally pleasant with one another. I wish that could be the end of the story. But it can’t. They are wrong about really important things, and they must be defeated. [...]

The Emotional Brain

Humans are an emotional creature. But, don’t take my word for it:
Emotions can be overpowering, but they are also the driving force of life. It was long thought that emotion and thought were separate processes. Brain science has begun to realise that the brain is not an organ of thought, but that it is a [...]

The Open Science Movement

It’s growing. And I’m all in favor of it.
Canton is part of a peaceful insurgency in science that is beginning to pry open an endeavor that still communicates its cutting-edge discoveries in much the same way it has since Ben Franklin was experimenting with lightning. Papers are published in research journals after being reviewed by [...]

Houston, We Have a Ghost Problem

Isn’t school supposed to be good for you?
Belief in the paranormal — from astrology to communicating with the dead — increases during college, rising from 23 percent among freshmen to 31 percent in seniors and 34 percent among graduate students.
(hat tip:  John Hawks)
Believing in Aliens is one thing, but ghosts?

It’s True, We’re All Butt-Heads

Humans belong to a sub-clasification of animals called deuterostomes (or second-mouth). During embryological development there is a period where part of the tissue “folds” back into itself creating what’s called a blastopore. The blastopore, in insects (and other members of the “other” group called protostomes, or first-mouth), forms the mouth. Not so [...]