[Hat tip to James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix.]
And it’s just lousy with bugs! This month the Carnival of Evolution hive is infesting Splendour Awaits, weblog of photographer and amateur insect enthusiast Adrian Thysse.
Creep or crawl your way over there and check out all the invertebrate wonderfulnessness!
Note: The Carnival is trying something a bit new this go around by presenting the article summaries and links in Google Docs – Presentation (a slide show format). If you have any difficulties seeing the slide window, please try another browser (Google Chrome worked best for me).
Previous Carnivals of Evolution:
If you missed any of these you’ll definitely want to go check them out!
A few months back Frank Sherwin, “Senior Science Lecturer” at the Institute for Creation Research, launched an amusing attack on evolution that is nigh on word-salad; this time focusing on insects, and how they are supposedly problematic for evolutionary theory.
As usual it is stated with the confidence and the faux authority that is typical of “creation science” practitioners but when you actually look at it and try to make sense of what is being said it quickly becomes apparent that much of it is really unintelligible nonsense.
I am going to give another wag of the finger, this time to Scientific American. They posted a number of paintings of reconstructions of various extinct “horses” in a picture gallery titled “Ancient Miniature Horses”, which includes an entry for the famous “dawn horse”, Hyracotherium.
However, the problems lies not in the painting, which is probably a reasonable guesstimate of what Hyracotherium might have looked like in life but rather with the blurb of information included with the painting:
Hyracotherium This genus of small early horse roamed the early woodlands of Asia, Europe and North America some 55 million to 45 million years ago. It was already larger than Sifrhippus, weighing about 22.7 kilograms. But when Richard Owen first discovered Hyracotherium in 1876, it was so diminutive that he thought it was some unknown hyrax species, a group of extant mammals that live in Africa and the Middle East.
Painting by Heinrich Harder used by S.A.
No, no, no, a thousand times no! It is bad enough when creationists claim that Hyracotherium is merely a hyrax (rather than a ancestral horse) and claim that Richard Owen thought so as well but to have a venerable science publication like Scientific American falling into the same pit of misinformation is extremely vexing.
That is I’ve been incorporated into a demotivational poster! It seems someone (picardo85?) over in the atheist section of reddit snagged my picture from the title explanation page of this blog along with an unattributed version of Scott Weitzenhoffer’s pigeonchess quote and combined them into a demotivational against Christians:
I have mixed feelings about this. While I have opinions about religion I tend to stay out of that debate and focus on issues involving science and attacks on science (creationism/antievolutionism), so having my image used (without my permission btw), as part of an attack Christians as a whole is a bit disconcerting.
On the other hand, having my image become part of a larger internet meme is somewhat amusing. Another funny thing came in the comment thread for the image on reddit:
If the pigeon represents the christians, why’s it playing chess with Jesus?
To which someone else responded:
It looks like Alan Moore to me…
Ha! Inserted into an internet meme, thought to look like the Messiah and/or the author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta all in one thread? Nice!
Seriously though, do I really look that much like Moore?
[I swear I already had this picture on my hard drive before I saw the one of Moore above.]
…the Emancipator and the Evolutionizer, together again!!!
Happy Darwin/Lincoln Day everyone!!!
Ladies and Gentlemen… Mesdames et Messieurs… Damen und Herren… The Carnival of Evolution XLIV! This month the carnival is inhabiting The Atavism (great name) and is cleverly set up as a scientific symposium. See for yourself.
Previous Carnivals of Evolution:
If you missed any of these you’ll definitely want to go check them out!
I shared this on Facebook a while back, thought I’d post it here as well―easy content… Seriously though, if you’re not amazed by this then there is something wrong with you.
I love the part were Daddy silverback pulls the young gorilla away from the funny looking hairless ape. I can almost hear him saying; “stay away from that, you don’t know where its been!” Click here for more on the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei).
Not my cup of tea* musically but fun just the same:
Hat tip to Michael Barton at The Dispersal of Darwin.
*technically no cup of tea is my cup of tea, as I loathe tea.
Oh no, not again…
Yep, it’s time for the Carnival of Evolution (#42)!!! This month it is being held at The Ocelloid and in case you can’t tell there is a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy theme. So grab your towel, pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and head on over for the latest batch of evolutionary goodness.
It’s either that or Vogon poetry…
Previous Carnivals of Evolution:
Life! Don’t talk to me about life.
Playing Chess with Pigeons 