evolutiongeek's blog

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Hello everyone! I'm sorry I haven't kept up on here as often as I should (if any of you want to see what I've been up to lately see http://laelaps.wordpress.com), but it's primarily because copy/pasting the posts from wordpress to here usually results in a jumble of HTML that's not very pretty. Even so, I thought I would mosey on back to write something just for everyone who has been wondering where I've been based upon a clip of National Geographic documentary I saw yesterday. The program was about Jaguars, the big spotted cats of the Americas, focusing on conservation efforts in the field to save the cats from extinction by hunting & human encroachment. Although I myself wish to be a conservation biologist someday in the near future, not everything done in the field is good for the animals, as was certainly the case with the design of the project led by one woman whose name escapes me at the moment. Working for WCS, she was attempting to determine if certain jaguars were feeding exclusively on cattle (as the local farmers lamented) by radio-collaring the animals and tracking their movements. In order to capture the animals in the first place she went out with some of the farmers and their dogs (beagles and mutts), hoping to corner the jaguar, tranquilize it, take measurements, and then affix a hefy radio-collar in order to later track the animals movements.  Read More »

Hello everyone! I hope everyone is getting a chance to enjoy their respective holidays and are looking forward to the new year. I've been busy petsitting since Christmas ended, enjoying the holiday with my wife's family in New York and coming out of it a few books heavier (I currently am loving Estes' Behavior Guide to African Mammals and The Seashell on the Mountain by Cutler). It seems that activity has died down on here a bit as well, but that's to be expected; I don't really want to get into evolution mega-posts over the vacation. Indeed, it seems that nothing constructive is being said in the uber-active threads that kept me checking this site every hour a few weeks ago, and it'll be good to have a fresh start. I just find it funny, however, for all the writing and attention given to my posts by anti-evolution folks, they've yet to explain anything scientifically and most of what's floating around in the comments would be better off flushed (mind you, hannodb's comments were more civil and constructive but contained nothing new and no scientific support for ID).  Read More »

Hi everyone,

       After doing some searching for a more dynamic website, I've found WordPress to be especially interesting and fun to work with, so I'll be moving over there shortly. I will still post and reply on here when I can, but if you want your nearly-daily dose of writing from myself, please bookmark http://laelaps.wordpress.com and visit there when you can. It will most likely be a more rich and interesting forum for my ideas and conversations, the best next step I think I can take in the culture war I seem to find myself in the middle of. Best regards,  Read More »

It's now only a week until Christmas, and I would have thought that the "long argument" over evolution and creationism would have subsided over the holidays, giving everyone a little year-end break. Hell, even Richard Dawkins had this to say, via note reproduced in the New York Times:

“Presumably your reason for asking me is that ‘The God Delusion’ is an atheistic book, and you still think of Christmas as a religious festival,” Mr. Dawkins wrote, in a reply printed here in its entirety. “But of course it has long since ceased to be a religious festival. I participate for family reasons, with a reluctance that owes more to aesthetics than atheistics. I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.”

He added: “So divorced has Christmas become from religion that I find no necessity to bother with euphemisms such as happy holiday season. In the same way as many of my friends call themselves Jewish atheists, I acknowledge that I come from Christian cultural roots. I am a post-Christian atheist. So, understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance, I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”  Read More »

Many blogs seem to have their own little Friday gimmick, so being that I plan on sticking around, I thought I would feature a different critter, extinct or extant, every Friday to share some of neat animals I love so much. Other than being the 1st installment, this entry is special because in the continuing evolution/ID debate hannodb suggested that there was never an ancestral rhino without a horn, but this is untrue. Perhaps the biggest terrestrial mammal to ever live, Paraceratherium orgosensis (aka Indricotherium) was an Oligocene (34-23 million years ago) perissodactyl (it had an uneven toe count, like rhinos). *Note, I'm sorry for all the parentheses, I just don't want to assume everyone knows what I'm talking about* These massive animals stood up to 15 feet at the shoulder with a total height of approximately 23 feet, making them the biggest things to live in what it now China. Although this group seems to be entirely extinct and did not lead to the extant lineages of rhinos around the world, they lacked horns juat like their ancestors, which in turn are the ancestors to the horned rhinos living today. To understand where Paraceratherium fits in, we need to go back a bit further in time.  Read More »

For any who has ever read the Discovery Institute's Wedge Document, it's clear that DI skipped over Phase I of their plan to restore morality to America and dove right into the media blitz of Phase II and Phase III. This is especially odd as the DI seems to recognize that without a solid scientific basis, their premise would ultimately fail, but like the Iraq war the promised "Shock and Awe" turned out merely to be shockingly awful. I've been carrying out debates with some pro-ID folks over the past few weeks, asking for any empirical evidence to discuss, but instead all I have received are God of the Gaps arguments (if we can't figure it out, God did it) and hypothetical statements that are based on flawed logic. A certain new research lab, however, is promising to change this. Yes, although creationists have been running their own peer-reviewed journal and threatening to destory methodological naturalism for years, the Biologic Institute (made possible by oodles of cash from the Discovery Institute) will finally put us uppity evolutionary scientists in our place.  Read More »

I saw the official notice yesterday afternoon, the Chinese River Dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) is now functionally extinct. This virtually blind dolphin was found only in the Yangtze River, and after a hard fight by conservationists, it appears that the dolphin is now lost, joining the ranks of other animals who have perished in the great extinction event that has been ongoing for most of human history. There may be a few dolphins left, stragglers left behind to live out the rest of their lives, but a recent expedition to find how many of these dolphins were left could not find any (only 7 were found in 1998). If there are in fact any left, the population is likely to be below 25, so even if said dolphins could find each other and breed, they would not be able to keep up their numbers and create enough genetic variation for the species to ultimately survive, similar to the inbreeding that created a genetic bottleneck in cheetahs at the end of the last ice age (cheetahs would likely be even more endangered or extinct if not for human intervention, and they are still vulnerable to many problems). Perhaps sightings of these dolphins will persist here and there (if there are any left at all), but it will be similar to those of the Ivory-billed woodpecker in that it doesn't necessarily mean they've escaped extinction, but rather that the population has been able to just been able to barely hang on but could disappear forever at any day.  Read More »