Posted by Nick Matzke on December 20, 2006 | Comments (38)

Continue reading  “Dembski planned to meet George W. Bush in 2004!”

Posted by Mike Dunford on August 11, 2005 | Comments (3)

Posted by Mike Dunford on August 10, 2005

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 21, 2005 | Comments (4)

This one sort of fits how I feel, too:

Frank: The Jesuits taught me how to think. I haven’t felt safe since.
—Homicide: Life on the Street

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 20, 2005 | Comments (7)

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.
—Terry Pratchett

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 19, 2005 | Comments (13)

This one comes from my “arrogant things people say in the scientific literature” file.

There is no credible evidence to justify the portrayal on the January 2002 Auk of Microraptor with a thick, white downy coating of putative protofeathers (A. Feduccia pers. obs.).
—Alan Feduccia
Birds are Dinosaurs: Simple Answer to a Complex Problem
The Auk: Vol. 119, No. 4, pp. 1187–1201.

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 18, 2005 | Comments (8)

With magic, you can turn a frog into a prince. With science, you can turn a frog into a Ph.D and you still have the frog you started with.
—Terry Pratchett
The Science of Discworld

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 17, 2005 | Comments (50)

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having
the ability to learn from the experience of others,
are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
—Douglas Adams
Last Chance to See

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 16, 2005 | Comments (3)

Today’s entry comes from the “creatively nasty” file:

Lorentzen and Sieg (1991) have insisted that parsimony analysis should properly result in the display of all possible assignments of ancestral nodes (and thus all possible placements of changes of state) for each character. Their objective may find little support outside of the pulp and paper industry.
  —Joeseph Felsenstein
  Inferring Phylogenies (p70)

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 15, 2005 | Comments (10)

The totality of life, known as the biosphere to scientists and creation to theologians, is a membrane of organisms wrapped around the earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a spacce shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered.
  —E.O. Wilson
  The Future of Life (2002)

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 14, 2005 | Comments (1)

Another old, but still relevant, quote…

And thus, a true Theory is a Fact; a Fact is a familiar Theory. That which is a Fact under one aspect, is a Theory under another. The most recondite Theories when firmly established are Facts: the simplest Facts involve something of the nature of Theory.
  —William Whewell
  Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (2nd ed, 1847)

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 13, 2005 | Comments (23)

The more things change…

“What men of science want is only a fair day’s wages for more than a fair day’s work; and most of us, I suspect, would be well content if, for our days and nights of unremitting toil, we could secure the pay which a first-class Treasury clerk earns without any obviously trying strain upon his faculties.”
  —Thomas Henry Huxley
  Administrative Nihilism (1871)

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 12, 2005 | Comments (12)

Yes, I actually am going to try to get a quote up every day. I’m also going to try to keep them at least moderately relevant to this blog’s topic. Some will be short and sweet, and some will be accompanied by commentary. Today’s is one of the commentary ones.

It has now been shown, though most briefly and imperfectly, how the law that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species,” connects together and renders intelligible a vast number of independent and hitherto unexplained facts. The natural system of arrangement of organic beings, their geographical distribution, their  geological sequence, the phaenomena of representative and substituted  groups in all their modifications, and the most singular peculiarites  of anatomical structure, are all explained and illustrated by it, in perfect accordance with the vast mass of facts which the researches of modern naturalists have brought together, and, it is believed, not  materially opposed to any of them. It also claims a superiority over previous hypotheses, on the ground that it not merely explains, but necessitates what exists. Granted the law, and many of the most important facts in Nature could not have been otherwise, but are almost as necessary deductions from it, as are the elliptic orbits of the planets from the law of gravitation.
  —Alfred Russel Wallace
  ON THE LAW WHICH HAS REGULATED
  THE INTRODUCTION OF NEW SPECIES (1855)

Commentary on the flipside.

Continue reading  “Quote of the Day - 12 July 2005”

Posted by Mike Dunford on July 11, 2005 | Comments (6)

A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.

—Aldous Huxley