calltoreason.org

A bit early this month but I need to make space for more updates next week. The most unusual thing about this installment is that none of the three articles this month are from The Economist! Two of the three articles are about biology while the last one is very speculative, very theoretical physics. The [...]

Just three articles this month, all of them related to biology in one way or another. The first one concerns what looks like an evolutionary adaptation in humans to living in the tropics. As this article from BBC News explains, scientists have long known that the birth rates of boys and girls vary across the [...]

Just a quick link to the news that the Texas school board is voting this week on a new curriculum that would challenge the principle of evolution. It’s pretty depressing that the chairman of the school board is someone who believes that God created the Earth less then 10,000 years ago. So again, for anyone [...]

Okay, this is really nothing more than a cool toy, but it is still really cool! This is made using a simple application by Roger Alsing that starts with a blank slate and then adds some random polygons to it. The result is compared to the source image and if it looks closer then it [...]

Well, the title says it all. I guess a late apology is better than none. It’s worth noting that the opposition to Darwin’s theory by the Church of England generated one of the famous public debates in history, the 1860 Oxford evolution debate. As the Wikipedia entry notes, the most famous line was: The debate [...]

Probably the most talked about scientific issue that’s been making the rounds recently is the news is that not only has human evolution not stopped since the advent of modern technology, a previously popular view, but has in fact actually accelerated. As this article in ABC News notes, in a recent paper published in the [...]

John Scalzi recently posted a highly entertaining account on his visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky in the US, complete with 100 photos of the whole thing. Among some of the most ridiculous claims the museum makes is that dinosaurs lived contemporaneously with humans until as late as the Fifth Dynasty of ancient kingdom [...]