In 1986, an expedition off the South-East coast of Australia near Tasmania, from depths of between 400 and 1,000 metres, brought up some jelly-like creatures, which were seen to be unusual and immediately preserved in ethanol. Now they have been examined, and assigned to a new genus Dendrogramma (from their resemblance to a tree diagram), with two species D. enigmatica and D. discoides.
I’ve often wondered about the Scopes trial, and wanted to read a good account of it. I was recommended the account by Edward J. Larson in When Science and Christianity Meet, edited by DC Lindberg and RL Numbers (ISBN 0226482162). . It’s a very informative book, and wide-ranging too: out of 12 chapters, only one on Galileo and one on Darwin.
A recent article by Nury Vittachi,
Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke, received rather a lot of comments. Among these were a few about the place of women in the world: however these tended to be lost among the welter of other comments. Indeed, the article seemed to attract a large number of
orcs. Now in some ways I am a highly discriminatory sort of person, and here I am discriminating between
trolls
For some time now in Britain, our “great and good” have been belabouring the more conservative part of our population [1] with accusations of Islamophobia and Homophobia. The implication of those two epithets is that they are some kind of medical or — by extension — moral pathology. I will attempt in this short blog to raise the subject of what I consider to be some errors of our “great and good.”
Carbon — to capture or not to capture
Betelgeuse, Gamow, and a Big Red Horse
Climate Change, the Walrus and the Carpenter
