evolutiongeek's blog

Sorry for the lapse in posts everyone, finals were upon me and I was unable to escape. Although I do have another, brand new, post about cannibalism in the works, I thought I would start a new thread for the argument that has been transferred from Homunculus to hannodb (the other comment sections were getting a little musty and needed airing out). In any case, here's my reply to hannodb, with my original comments in italics and preceded/superceded with ***, hannodb's comments in bold, and my new comments as regular text. Sorry for the sloppiness, but I can't think of a better way to partition things at the moment. And away we go....  Read More »

I just wanted to take a brief moment and say thank you to all who helped make my blogging experience here a success thus far; the $500 scholarship will most certainly be will spent next semester as I take even more specialized courses on evolutionary theory, geology, and behavioral biology (hopefully getting away to dig up fossils when I can). In any case, I owe a fair bit of my success to my detractors and those who did not agree with me; without controversy, life would be uninteresting. Thus, although I must heartily acknowledge the support of fellow members like Martins10, Nixxle, The Voice of Reason, Darwin's Beagle, Scarlet Seraph, and others, I would be remiss if I also didn't thank Homunculus, DavetheLoneRanger, and hanno for their comments and rebuttals to my massive mega-posts. I also would like to say thank you to infidels.org, the Geoscience Research Institute, members of the Richard Dawkins forums, Debunk Creationism on Yahoo!, and other websites that picked up my threads and spread them across the web (even if it did result in ID and creationists making it easier to find me). I also must thank superior weblogs like Pharyngula, Evolving Thoughts, and the Panda's Thumb for being sources of daily inspiration providing plenty of fodder to go off about. In any case, if you've ever read any of my work, ever (including this post), thank you for taking the time to hear me out. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I am always thankful for those who listen and think critically so that we may all benefit. Although the contest is over, I quite like it here and the issues that have been raised so far this month continue to rage on (I think it's time for a new thread- things are getting crowded on here!) and there is plenty more to keep writing about, so once finals are over I shall be back in the full swing of things. Here's a preview; the next topic will be about the most unsettling of culinary habits, cannibalism (yikes!) including those who made an artificial substitute for human flesh for those curious enough to try it. It's sure to be doozy, but until next time, thank you for allowing me to stand up and voice my opinion, and although it's good to be a winner, the experience gained for this little experiment has been far more valuable than imagined. Best regards,  Read More »

Charles Darwin had a bit of a daily routine during his post-Beagle days, once writing "My life goes on like clockwork, and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it" (Letter to Fitzroy, October 1st, 1846 via http://darwin.lib.cam.ac.uk/perl/nav?pclass=letter&pkey=1002). Perhaps it is a bit premature for me to be contemplating ending my life fixed anywhere, but it does seem that I have made a daily routine of my own. It is different from day to day, but typically my blog is the first and last thing I check every day of late is this blog in order to see who I've pissed off now. Indeed, it seems that while I would love to move on and write out enjoyment, I have to continuously write out of frustration and I am tired of having to spend so much time repeating myself (ad naseum) about evolution. Now I know why Gould reccomended that one should not enter into debate with ID or creationist advocates: IT NEVER ENDS! In the past few weeks I've had criticism come from a ID/creationism advocates young and old, foreign and domestic, some even forming a Waldorf and Statler-like relationship in heckling me. In any case, if anyone has somehow missed it, I've been engaged in a debate with Homunculus that has failed to be constructive, and here is the latest from him. I would say "enjoy" but I have long since left the land of enjoyment and entered into the realm of frustration and exasperation, but I will continue to respond to arguments raised as a result of my writing in turn. Here we go again->

"I’m waiting for your reply ...on the metaphysical underpinnings of macro-evolutionary theory, i.e. methodological materialism. MM is contrived to get the results evolution is looking for; rigging the game to always win. MM is a giant step away from the gold standard of all scientific inquiry, i.e. empiricism, which is governed by experimental observation, NOT THEORY (with Darwinism the THEORY is the dog that wags the evidential tail)."  Read More »

For those of you that may have missed it, I've been going back and forth with Homunculus about the nature of Intelligent Design over the past few days. He doesn't agree with me, nor do I with him, and rather than keep it buried in the comments section I thought I would drag the thread out into the light. After spending the day at the American Museum of Natural History yesterday, I spent the better part of my evening and this morning re-reading the blood-clotting chapter of Behe's Darwin's Black Box and trying to get a grip on the various scientific papers on the subject. I must admit I am not a biochemist, genetecist, or microbiologist (my main interests being in paleontology, ecology, behavior, functional morphology, etc) but I've done my best to understand what's going on here and cited other sources when I feel I can't do the topic justice myself. In any case, here is my line-by-line response to the latest comment sent to me, and I hope that it proves to be enlightening. It is a bit long, so you may want to grab a drink or read it in parts, but hopefully it doesn't put anyone to sleep. And away we go...  Read More »

Another little news tidbit blipped across my radar this morning; a new study is out saying that the single meteor impact at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago is still the "smoking gun" that smote the dinosaurs. There have been worse extinctions in the history of the Earth (like the Permian/Triassic extinction when over 90% of known fauna from that time died out), but this is perhaps the most famous as it 1)involved dinosaurs, and 2) we have some kind of mechanism for how it works. But is it all just as simple as that? When I was a kid, I remember the meteor being the #1 hypothesis in all the documentaries and it seemed to make plenty of sense. Then again, as I learned more about the impact and the end of the Mesozoic ("Middle Life"), things seemed to be less clear. Indeed, one of the big controversies is what actually killed off the dinosaurs, and although the new study seems to have the answer, I'm not convinced.  Read More »

Ok, this is a bit strange, but I heard of a website today where the theme is as follows-> Women sign up because they want a free boob-job, so they send naughty pictures to paying men who "donate" money so these women can get their saline implants. Some of the women have lost a lot of weight or had kids, thus losing their former figures, but I mean geez... I thought we were a boob-centric culture already. It's just another example of why I feel prostitution really isn't outlawed everywhere. Sure, it might be in a legal sense or sense of picking a strange woman up off the streets, but with the advent of technology lots of guys spend thousands (even millions) of dollars total every day to watch women strip or do other sexual things on webcams. If it wasn't making money, it wouldn't be so widespread. To me, this is not exactly the same as prostitution, but close; men pay a woman, who may be thousands of miles away, to do what he wants to bring him pleasure. I'm not going to dive into the whole right/wrong issues of morality here (that's another post) but it just seems that some people might be fooling themselves by saying "I don't visit prostitutes, I just pay women on the internet to get me off, that's all." If one thing is for use, there will almost certainly be women  of the "oldest profession" around regardless of societies views or laws.  Read More »

When I logged on to check my mail this morning, I caught a little blip of a headline that said "Whale attacks trainer at Sea World." It turns out that one of the trainers (who had been working with the whales for over a decade) was suppossed to pop up out of the water on Shamu's nose, but instead the orca decided to grab his foot and hold him underwater. The trainer was released but Shamu grabbed his foot again and submerged the trainer once more, after which the trainer was able to escape. Although they parks like Sea World don't like talking about such events, there have been a number of accounts of similar behavior seen in captive orcas. I'm a bit split about the issue of cetaceans (dolphins and whales) in captivity being they are so intelligent, but then again they can't be effectively reintroduced into the wild and survive on their own. Keiko was reintroduced to the ocean, but he followed people around until his death and never joined a pod. So it's either take away a baby orca at birth to reintroduce into the wild, scarring parent and child with a high likelihood of failure, or keep the whales that are in captivity and do not take any more from the wild. I do wish the environments were a bit more fun for the whales, however. Their realm home is the ocean, a big place with lots of things to explore and play with. In fact, I bet a lot of cetaceans in captivity get bored and experience a lot of behavioral problems because of their frustration. I'm sure the park tries their best to provide for the animals and the trainers love them, but I can't shake the feeling that it's a bit irresponsible and unethical to keep these intelligent animals locked up in such a manner.  Read More »

Looking over Pharyngula today (scienceblogs.com/pharyngula) I noticed a post about the new "Left Behind" PC game. To be honest, I never read the books, never saw the movie, and I really have no desire to. The whole "Rapture Ready" thing has always seemed a bit cultish to me, and I don't really want to read about Jesus laying waste to entire armies with heat beams from his eyes or some damned thing. In any case, gamespot did a review that I'll let speak for itself, which can be found here - http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/leftbehindeternalforces/review.html  Read More »