Some more on that snake leg 17 Sep 2009 Lanclet, discussing a Jerry Coyne comment on a Pharyngula post, suggests that the snake actually had ingested a lizard, and the lizard’s leg had punctured the snake. It doesn’t change the point about atavisms, but it does make the case less sexy… Evolution
Evolution ID not OK in UK 26 Jun 2007 The Register is reporting that the UK government has ruled that intelligent design is not acceptable in science classes. [via Slashdot] Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity On speciation 26 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 The Atavism has some thoughts on speciation in response to a high school teacher’s query. He uses the following nice diagram to indicate what some of the core species definitions mean: It’s neat, and therefore… wrong. By which I mean that given the rule that biological organisms do what they… Read More
Epistemology Domains and theories in science 19 Jun 201122 Jun 2018 We are getting to the tail end of this series. Here are the previous posts: The false analogy between species and art Pattern cladism and the myth of theory dependence of observation Species, phenomena and data More on phenomena Disambiguating the Theory-Dependence of Observation thesis (TDOT) In this post I… Read More