Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on July 09, 2005 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Panda’s Thumb weblog is switching servers and software this weekend.

• If http://www.pandasthumb.org… doesn’t work at some point, try using http://www2.pandasthumb.org… instead to browse.

• Posting and commenting will be disabled during the switch.

Posted by Reed on July 02, 2005 | Comments (30) | TrackBack (0)

The comments are now back online.  Our spam blocker no longer sees every post as inappropriate.

Last night we got some specifically crafted spam that when despamed could create a rule that would match any comment submitted.  I didn’t pay enough attention when I despamed it and thus the omnibus rule was added to our filter causing all comments to be rejected.

I apologize for any frustration that this has caused our readers.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on May 20, 2005 | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

As a virtual bar, the Panda’s Thumb relies on passing packets to enable the contributors to say their stuff and the commenters to put in their two cents. Well, for various reasons the management hasn’t been completely happy with the current packet-passer, and has arranged for a new packet-passing service. Unfortunately, this means that in the switchover, there may be a longish period where the name and the particular address used aren’t matched up. We have to change the “domain name service” (thanks, “wbrameld4”)  entries for PT tonight, and these may take up to 48 hours to propagate. So don’t be surprised if you can’t get to PT this weekend. We hope that it won’t take that long for the DNS entries to propagate, but here we’ll give you fair warning.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on March 29, 2005 | Comments (35) | TrackBack (1)

In a column discussing the flap over antievolution resistance to reality-based IMAX documentaries, Roger Ebert puts in a plug for the TalkOrigins Archive.

An industry has grown up around the “science” supporting the “argument for intelligent design.” It refuses the possibility that evolution itself is the most elegant and plausible argument for those who wish to believe in intelligent design. If you are interested, you might want to go to www.talkorigins.org, where the errors of creationist science are patiently explained. And you might want to ask at your local IMAX theater why they allow a few of their customers to make decisions for all of the rest.

(Film about volcanoes falls victim to creationists)

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on March 23, 2005 | Comments (22) | TrackBack (1)

Today, March 23, 2005, marks the Panda’s Thumb weblog first year of service. Now we have nearly 900 posts, nearly 22,000 comments, and over 450,000 visits logged by Sitemeter. We’re around ranking #508 in the “Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem”. Site traffic runs about two-thirds that of the TalkOrigins Archive. Happy Birthday, Panda’s Thumb!

This past year, PT brought its readers the first public notice of the Stephen C. Meyer article in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. As a scoop, it was a doozy, leading notice in Nature, Science, and other venues. PT also led with a technical critique of a paper by Michael Behe and David Snoke on evolving complex adaptations. (Both of these are also linked in the “Must Read” sidebar on the right of the PT main page.) This sort of leadership did not go unmissed: Panda’s Thumb ran high in the vote tallies for the Koufax Awards in the “Best Group Blog” category.

We’ve had a lot of laughs at the expense of the Discovery Institute Media Complaints Division, but we’ve also kept in touch with the serious side of all this, which is the integrity of science education in our public schools. There is humor to be had while we take care of serious business, and we’ll be keeping this in mind in the coming year. I’m not sure what to say to the Panda’s Thumb Bar Crew besides, “Thanks, and another round, please.”

Posted by Reed on February 17, 2005 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The voting for the Koufax awards ends tomorrow.  The Panda’s Thumb is a finalist in the Best Group Blogs cateogry.  If you like us and haven’t already voted, please vote for The Panda’s Thumb to help us win.

The election is over, but creationism isn’t.

P.S. You can also vote for PZ’s Pharyngula as the Best Expert Blog.

Posted by Ed on February 17, 2005 | Comments (33) | TrackBack (0)

Bobby Maddex, senior editor of Crux magazine, has replied to my criticism of inaccuracies that were present in accounts of the Sternberg/Smithsonian situation written by him and by John Coleman. While Coleman responding reasonably and graciously, thanking me for pointing out the inaccuracies and making the requisite corrections, Maddex chooses instead to complain, without justification, about his mistreatment. Along the way, he also adds a few more inaccurate statements to the ones initially criticized. For a full fisking of his reply, see this post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Posted by pz on February 11, 2005 | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

The Panda's Thumb has made it into the final voting for Best Group Blog. If you're a fan of evolution, leave a message to vote.

P.S. You can also vote for Pharyngula in the Best Expert Blog category.

Posted by Reed on February 07, 2005 | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

Salvador is making some noise on ARN about  a comment of his being rejected by our spam filter.  This post is to clarify things.

Spammers target blogs with comments.  These attacks can be harsh.  At times spammers will go through every single post in the blog and post three comments containing scores of links advertising every thing from child rape to internet bingo.

To counter such horrid spam, we employ a blacklist plugin that searches every comment for certain patterns and rejects any that fit.  Unfortunately sometimes non-spam also gets blocked.  Users are sent a message informing them of the bad content so they can change the post.  (Robotic spammers ignore such messages.)

Our typical cycle of spam control went like this:

1. Spam gets through the filter.

2. We recognize the spam.

3. Add the urls from the spam to the blacklist.

4. Delete the messages that got through.

Of course, the time between 1 and 4 can be hours or days, which can lead to a lot of naughty messages sitting around the blog for a while.

I finally got fed up with this reactionary technique a few months ago, and decided if there was a better option.  I tried the explanatory filter but it was unable to detect links designed by spammers.  So I had to fall back to old methodology and took links from our blacklist, which I already knew had been designed by spammers, and tried to deduce some megarules from them.  I ended up deciding to block urls that contained multiple hyphens, since about 75% of the spammers’ urls went something like “hot-chicks-want-to-hottub-with-you.ruky.net.”  (I also blocked all .info addresses since we were only getting spam from them.)

The multi-hyphen megarule has worked very well.  However, it is still experimental and has been modified more than once.  If you have a problem with getting a url past the spam blocker, you can simply use tinyurl.com to create a replacement url.  That is what Wesley did in this comment to link to ISCID.  (Contrary to some claims we did not change the blacklist for Wesley.)

We do make our blacklist publicly available, blacklist.txt, so anyone can check if we are banning sites critical towards us.  Sorry, would-be martyrs, we do not censor your favorite sites from comments, unless you’re into mature mamas or something.  Besides if we wanted to censor you, we’d ban your IP, not add you to our spam blocker.

Posted by Reed on December 12, 2004 | Comments (41) | TrackBack (0)

Evolution bests Creationism

Evolution: 39,300,000
Creationism: 700,000

Posted by Reed on November 30, 2004 | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Merriam-Webster has released the top 10 words of the year.  (Reuters)

Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster compiles the list each year by taking the most researched words on its Web sites and then excluding perennials such as affect/effect and profanity.

The company said most online dictionary queries were for uncommon terms, but people also turned to its Web sites for words in news headlines.

And the number one word is … “blog.”

Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer

Cicada was number 6.

Posted by Henry Neufeld on November 27, 2004 | Comments (118) | TrackBack (1)

Thanks to everyone for your welcoming comments.  I want to start by giving an overview of my own positions and the topics on which I believe I can make a profitable contribution here.

I’m called a theistic evolutionist.  I have significant problems with that designation, though I find it necessary to use it at times.  First, I accept the biological theory of evolution.  It’s not a doctrine, it’s not a philosophy, it’s not my religion; I accept it as a valuable and overwhelmingly well-documented and supported scientific theory.  Second, I am a theist, in that I believe in a personal God.  The second does not impact the first.  There would be no difference in my formulation of any scientific statement about evolution and that of an atheist.  There is no such thing as a theory of “theistic evolution,”  there is only the theory of evolution.  But because there are those who assume that the debate over creation and evolution is one between theism and atheism, it is necessary to make that designation.

So what am I doing here?

Continue reading  “Opening Shot”

Posted by Reed on November 02, 2004 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

We at the Panda’s Thumb would like to develop an open submission policy to encourage guest contributions to our blog.  We are currently looking at a two stage process.  First abstracts are submitted and if accepted a full length post will follow.  We are also looking into having a way for readers to alert us to news stories that we may have missed.

Now, the purpose of this post is to get feedback on this idea from the community.  If you have any suggestions on how to structure the open submission policy, we’d like to hear from you in the comments.

Posted by John Wilkins on October 22, 2004 | Comments (42) | TrackBack (0)

A recent blog by Matt Young has more than a few folk upset. I am not upset, exactly, but I do not agree with the way he characterised the political spectrum, or the general features of the parochial duopoly he has drawn from American party politics. Most of all, though, I object to the notion that biology, in particular evolution, has any warrant in such debates at all.

Continue reading  “Politics and evolution”

Posted by John Wilkins on July 14, 2004 | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

A new blog “dedicated to the history and philosophy of biology, including Darwinism, evolutionary ethics and game theory” has been started by the philosophy department at Florida State University, Michael Ruse’s home department.

It’s early days yet, with a couple of posts about rational behavior and economic evolution. Keep an eye out - they are seeking contributors, and yours truly has offered.

Posted by Reed on June 14, 2004 | Comments (46) | TrackBack (1)

The Panda’s Thumb will be going through some changes.  Where we once were a bland caterpillar, we are going to emerge soon as a beautiful, elegant butterfly.  (Or nasty maggot to shit-eating fly, take your pick.)  Some might say that PT is evolving, but no we are developing, growing into adulthood.  We will have fur where there wasn’t fur before, our voice will deepen, and might even grow a breast or two.  So please bear with us as we make the changes.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on June 03, 2004 | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

The server that hosts the Panda’s Thumb was affected by the power outages in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex area. The server was offline from about 4AM on the 2nd, and went back online around 7PM on the 3rd. As it is, we should consider it fortunate to have power restored so soon.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on May 27, 2004 | Comments (209) | TrackBack (0)

With any tavern, one can expect that certain things that get said are out-of-place. But there is one place where almost any saying or scribble can find a home: the bathroom wall. This is where random thoughts and oddments that don’t follow the other entries at the Panda’s Thumb wind up. As with most bathroom walls, expect to sort through a lot of oyster guts before you locate any pearls of wisdom.

Posted by Ed on April 29, 2004 | Comments (23) | TrackBack (0)

I would like to welcome two new contributors to the Panda’s Thumb crew.

Mike Dunford has been a contributor to talk.origins for so long that he almost doesn’t feel like the new kid on the block any more. Currently, Mike is an Nth year senior at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he is (finally) completing his B.S. in Zoology. Following completion of his undergraduate work, he plans to continue to study evolution in island environments (especially ones with good beaches). Current interests include speciation processes in sympatric populations, and the evolution of introduced species. In the past, he has worked as a paleontological lab technician. Other interests include the history of geology, especially in 19th century England.

Paul R. Gross is University Professor of Life Sciences, emeritus, at the University of Virginia. His baccalaureate and doctoral degrees are from the University of Pennsylvania. He holds honorary degrees from Brown University and the Medical College of Ohio. He is a developmental and molecular biologist who has taught at Brown, Rochester, MIT, and the University of Virginia. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served from 1978 to 1988 as President and Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, and was Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, where he helped to found and served as Director of the Molecular Biology Institute. He is co-author with Norman Levitt of Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins, 1994, 98) and with Barbara Forrest of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford, 2004).

A hearty Panda’s Thumb welcome to Mike and Paul. Protostome Pilsners are on the house for the next hour. Cheers!

Posted by jml on April 21, 2004 | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

PZ made me aware of this via his blog, and I thought it should be posted here.

According to this press release, the venerable evolutionary biologist, John Maynard Smith has died aged 84. Maynard Smith started as an aeronautical engineer, but after World War II became interested in evolutionary biology, eventually being mentored by JBS Haldane. He is especially noted for his work on game theory, the evolution of sex, and also on the major transitions in the development of life.

I had the pleasure of meeting JMS in 1989 when I was a member of the organizing committee for University College Dublin’s Biological Society. He had been retired from the University of Sussex for about five years by then, and we arranged for him to come and talk. It was quite the experience spending four hours after the talk in a pub listening to (and being listened to) by one of the world’s greatest evolutionary biologists. We talked biology, beer, socialism, and how not to organize a biological sciences department, among many topics. It was clear that he genuinely cared what we graduate students had to say.  Many pints of Guinness were enjoyed that night and the memory lives with me.

For more on Maynard Smith and his work, see the Center for the Study of Evolution at Sussex.

Posted by Ian Musgrave on April 21, 2004 | Comments (61) | TrackBack (0)

I was somewhat bemused by Francis Beckwith’s report that ID advocates consider Forensic Science to not be a part of natural science (perhaps natural science is only that which is presented by David Attenbrough). How could reasonable people not see that Forensic science is part of natural science thought I.

Then I had one of my semiannual encounters with the public understanding of science.

Continue reading  “The Stars like Dust”

Posted by John Wilkins on March 28, 2004 | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

It is, wrote the Roman poet Horace, fit and proper to die for one's homeland. The word he used for homeland was "patria" (dulce et decorum est pro patria mori), and the word has entered into biology as the suffix for exactly that. Unlike Horace's slogan, though, it applies more to living than dying. It would be nice if we humans could attempt to live for our homelands rather than die for them, but that's another rant for another time.

There are a cluster of terms used by biologists to describe where organisms live or grow, and they are: sympatric, allopatric, parapatric, peripatric, stasipatric, and dichopatric. This flock of technical terms is confusing to the newcomer (and to some biologists), but there is a kind of logic - as much as in the evolution of any technical jargon - that will make it clearer, and at the same time allow us to set up the alternative views on the fundamental evolutionary process of common descent: speciation.

Continue reading  “Living Words: Pro patria - species and homeland security”

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on March 27, 2004 | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)

As a place to meet and share opinions, the Panda’s Thumb encourages a wide range of comments. In order to be clear about what patrons may expect concerning comment text they leave here, we state the following policies:

As far as possible, the integrity of comments will be respected, with the following exceptions.

1. Illegal, offensive, and spam comments may be removed in their entirety. The management has the sole privilege of determining whether a comment requires removal and whether a repeat offender should be banned.

2. Superfluous comments may be removed without notice, as in talk between contributors concerning board layout, duplicate comments, or other meta-site issues.

3. Broken links or other formating problems may be revised by the management to improve the utility of a comment, at the management’s sole discretion.

4. Entry post authors and the management may move comments that are deemed inappropriate to the topic of the entry post, excessively inflammatory, or otherwise disruptive of substantive commentary to the Bathroom Wall.  Repeat offenders may have their comments restricted to the Bathroom Wall or disemvoweled.

5. The management is not responsible for factors beyond their control that may interfere with comment integrity, such as software glitches, hardware failure, and problems with Internet connectivity.

6. Posting under multiple identities or falsely posting as someone else may lead to removal of affected comments and blocking of the IP address from which those comments were posted, at the discretion of the management.

Simply put, don’t make a jerk out of yourself.

This policy may be revised as future conditions warrant.

Posted by John Wilkins on March 25, 2004 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

A common misunderstanding of evolution is that it is all about genes. Genes are important, but organisms do a lot, too. One of the things they do is modify their environment to suit themselves, and to suit their progeny. This is called "niche construction", and I came across this rather nice essay on Jim Harrison's inanis et vacua blog on the topic, which I am posting here with his permission.

A note to add to this is the book of essays published a few years ago on this and related topics, putting the discussion in a more general context:

Oyama, Susan, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray, eds. 2000. Cycles of contingency: Developmental systems and evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

There is a revolution in the thinking of evolutionary theory right now. It may take, as Jim notes, a while to become widely known...

Continue reading  “Finding Your Niche”

Posted by Ed on March 25, 2004 | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

According to Blogdex right now, The Panda's Thumb is the 11th most referenced blog today. We were 15th yesterday.

According to Blogpulse, we're #8.

And according to Technorati, we now have 111 links from 68 blogs, which is enough to push us into "marauding marsupial" territory. I've never seen a marsupial maraud before, but it can't be a pretty sight.

Posted by Ed on March 25, 2004 | Comments (21) | TrackBack (1)

One thing you may notice toward the bottom of the lefthand sidebar is something that reads:

I'm a
Insignificant Microbe
in the
TTLB Ecosystem

Some explanation is probably a good idea. This is a ranking system for blogs developed by N.Z. Bear, the owner of the Truth Laid Bear website, based upon the number of other blogs that are linking to that blog or to articles found on it. The more incoming links from other blogs a given page gets, the higher it ranks. Ah, but here comes the irony...

The TLLB ecosystem divides the rankings into taxonomic categories, just like biology does with plants and animals. The categories go as follows:

Higher Beings
Mortal Humans
Playful Primates
Large Mammals
Marauding Marsupials
Adorable Rodents
Flappy Birds
Slithering Reptiles
Crawly Amphibians
Flippery Fish
Slimy Molluscs
Lowly Insects
Crunchy Crustaceans
Wiggly Worms
Multicellular Microorganisms
Insignificant Microbes

Anyone familiar with biology will of course recognize that this is, roughly, the order of appearance of these various life forms on the planet. Every blog begins as an "insignificant microbe" and progresses up the scale to "higher beings" (if they become extraordinarily popular). The irony, for a blog that focuses on evolution, is that this ranking system is based upon a popular but nonetheless false conception of evolution as an inexorably progressive march toward some goal. In reality, a reptile is no more "advanced" or "evolved" than an amphibian, both are well adapted to their environments. Evolution deals with fitness for a local environment, not with some overall state of "more evolved" or "less evolved". Indeed, one could make the case that those insignificant microbes - bacteria - are "more evolved" than humans. After all, they've survived far longer, occupy a far more diverse set of environments, and evolve at a rate that often exceeds the ability of humans to combat them through antibiotics.

Another irony is that if one accepts this "great chain of being" concept of evolutionary progress, this blog seems to be moving rapidly up the scale. At this point, The Panda's Thumb is listed as an "insignificant microbe", but the number of incoming links and the number of daily visits, after only 2 days, actually places us in the middle of the "adorable rodents" taxon. Talk about rapid speciation! Even in Gould and Eldredge's wildest imaginations, they could not have foreseen the equilibrium being punctuated at a rate of 10 major saltational leaps in a mere 2 days. Perhaps The Panda's Thumb is really a hopeful monster after all.

Posted by pz on March 24, 2004 | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

...and now a link from Carl Zimmer!

Dang it, now I've got to get to work and post something substantial here.

Posted by Ed on March 24, 2004 | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)

The Northern Lights blog has posted a link to us, for which I certainly thank them. But the article linking to us contains some specious reasoning that I feel the need to reply to. To wit:

Clearly, this weblog results from design of some sort, not random combination. ID advocates must be flattered that so many people consider them a serious threat to Western civilization as we know it. I'm no defender of ID as a scientific theory, but the question of what should be included in the science curriculum of a public high school is not a scientific question, it's a public policy question. This point seems lost on biologists and the growing horde of blog commentators who feel constrained to weigh in on this subject.

I would argue that the public policy question is a scientific question. That is, the public policy criteria for what should be in the science curriculum should be essentially scientific criteria. Non-scientific alternatives to scientific theories that lack explanatory power and are not testable or falsifiable should not be a part of public school science curricula. This seems so obvious to me as to be axiomatic, but if the author of the above blog has a better standard I'd like to hear it.

Continue reading  “Another Link, but With Some Strange Comments”

Posted by Yang Yang on March 24, 2004 | Comments (18) | TrackBack (4)

The Panda’s Thumb is the collaborative effort of a large group of people from all over the world. The contributions of a diverse range of individuals will hopefully add up to a valuable resource for our readers.

Disclaimer

As a general disclaimer, please understand that the views expressed by each individual poster here at The Panda’s Thumb are their own. Each contributor is solely responsible for the content of their posts and they do not represent the views of the various organizations and businesses they may be affiliated with.

The opinions expressed in opening posts are those of the author only, and do not reflect the opinions of other authors, other organizations, or PandasThumb.org itself.  PandasThumb.org does not review or approve material before it is posted.  Contact the author if you have a concern about content or the site administration if the authorship of an opening post is unclear.  Links to other sites do not imply approval or endorsement of the content at those links by PandasThumb.org.  Linked content may be altered by other parties, and thus issues with linked content should be taken up directly with the creators of that content. Commenting is generally open to the public, and the opinions expressed there are solely those of the commenters.  Panda’s Thumb has a Comment Integrity Policy for dealing with the content of comments.

Crew

This is a list of the contributors to The Panda’s Thumb, with some brief biographical information about each one:

Andrea Bottaro is an immunologist and molecular biologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.  []

Matthew Brauer is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University, where he is studying the evolutionary responses of metabolic networks in eukaryotes. He holds a B.A. in biochemistry from U.C.-Berkeley, an M.S. in statistics and a PhD in biological sciences from the University of Texas at Austin. He wrote a chapter in Robert Pennock’s book Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics.  []

Ed Brayton is the co-founder of Michigan Citizens for Science. He is the group’s resident non-academic, being a businessman and concerned citizen with a longstanding interest in this issue.  []

Reed Cartwright is currently completing his PhD in genetics at the University of Georgia. He holds a B.S. in genetics and an A.B. in Latin from UGA as well. He has written extensively on evolution and Intelligent Design and is active with Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education.  []

Mike Dunford has been a contributor to talk.origins for so long that he  almost doesn’t feel like the new kid on the block any more. Currently, Mike is an Nth year senior at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he is (finally) completing his B.S. in Zoology. Following completion of his undergraduate work, he plans to continue to study evolution in island environments (especially ones with good beaches). Current interests include speciation processes in sympatric populations, and the evolution of introduced species. In the past, he has worked as a paleontological lab technician. Other interests include the history of geology, especially in 19th century England.

Wesley R. Elsberry is a biologist with an eclectic academic and work history. He holds a B.S. in Zoology (U. Fl.), an M.S.C.S.  (Computer Science, U. Tx. at Arlington), and a Ph.D. in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences (Tx. A&M U.). He has worked in biological, medical, and veterinary research; software design and development for military contractors; and photojournalism and studio photography.  His research interests include the physiology and bioenergetics of dolphin biosonar sound production, the hearing of marine mammals, bioacoustics, animal behavior, and emergent computation (artificial neural systems, evolutionary computation). He became interested in the evolution/creation controversy in 1986 after attending a young-earth creationist lecture at the University of Florida.  Since then, Wesley has become more involved in the issue, finally “turning pro” late in 2003 by becoming the Information Project Director for the National Center for Science Education. His views as expressed at The Panda’s Thumb are his own and are not necessarily shared by NCSE, its employees, or its supporters.  []

Jim Foley is a software engineer from Canberra, Australia, who has been fascinated by creationism since encountering it at university. His main interest is the intersection of human evolution and creationism, and he is the author of the Fossil Hominids website which explores these subjects. He is married with four children and enjoys reading, squash, and tae kwon do.

Paul R. Gross is University Professor of Life Sciences, emeritus, at the University of Virginia. His baccalaureate and doctoral degrees are from the University of Pennsylvania. He holds honorary degrees from Brown University and the Medical College of Ohio. He is a developmental and molecular biologist who has taught at Brown, Rochester, MIT, and the University of Virginia. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served from 1978 to 1988 as President and Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, and was Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, where he helped to found and served as Director of the Molecular Biology Institute. He is co-author with Norman Levitt of Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins, 1994, 98) and with Barbara Forrest of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford, 2004).

Richard Hoppe is an Affiliated Scholar in Biology at Kenyon College, and CEO of Intellitrade, Inc., which uses evolutionary algorithms to model market systems.  His Ph.D. in experimental psychology is from the University of Minnesota.  []

Burt Humburg is a graduate of and lab assistant at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. In the summer of 2005, he will begin a residency in internal medicine at Penn State University — Hershey Medical Center. He is a former board member with Kansas Citizens for Science.

Gary S. Hurd received a doctorate in Social Science from the University of California, Irvine in 1976. He subsequently served on the faculties of the California College of Medicine (UCIMC), the Medical College of Georgia (Psychiatry), and held numerous adjunct appointments. Since 1985, he has returned to archaeology, the principle focus of his early research. He has received several honors for teaching and research and has over one hundred publications, including abstracts and technical reports, ranging from topics in psychiatry, mathematics and chemistry to frass, fish digestion, prehistoric ceremonialism and forensic taphonomy. Hurd became actively involved in the creationist anti-science debate while the Curator of Anthropology, and Director of Education for the Orange County Museum of Natural History.  []

Matt Inlay is currently a post-doc at UCSD, where he received his Ph.D. in Biology in 2003.  His research focused on the regulation of V(D)J recombination by enhancers and enhancer elements.  []

Jack Krebs is the vice-president of Kansas Citizens for Science. After receiving his undergraduate degree in anthropology, with an emphasis on religion and belief systems, he began a long career in secondary public education that has included being a math teacher, technology director and curriculum director. Jack has had extensive experience with curriculum standards in a wide range of areas.  He also has long-standing interests in science, philosophy, and religion.  []

John Lynch is an evolutionary biologist in Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, where he also is affiliated with the Institute of Human Origins, the Center for Biology & Society, and the Center for the Study of Law, Science & Technology. He holds a PhD in biology from University College in Dublin, Ireland, and continues to do biological research into morphological evolution in mammals, most recently into temporal bone variation in great apes and fossil hominds.  []

Nicholas Matzke is a Public Information Project Specialist with the National Center for Science Education. He holds bachelor’s degrees in biology and chemistry from Valparaiso University, and an M.A. in geography from U.C.-Santa Barbara. His views as expressed at The Panda’s Thumb are his own and are not necessarily shared by NCSE, its employees, or its supporters.

Ian Musgrave is a biomedical researcher and University lecturer from Australia. His current area of research is into a protein so obscure that only four other people actually belive it exists. He is also researching Alzheimer’s disease, for reasons he can’t currently remember. In a career that has spanned 25 years, Ian has counted kangaroo poo in western Queensland, dug up beet root in the Darling Downs, lost an entire herd of cattle in an experimental tropical grass paddock, and measured the hight of sand dunes on Frazer Island. It is generally felt that he can do the least harm studying obscure proteins away from normal people. When not researching obscure proteins or obsessively tracking down long out-of-date publications on peppered moths, Ian is an amateur astronomer, bushwalker and aficionado of folk music, often combining all 3 three activities at folk music camps in the bush.  []

PZ Myers is an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota-Morris. He holds a B.S. in zoology from the University of Washington and a PhD in biology from the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. He has previously taught at the University of Utah and at Temple University.  []

Mark Perakh is a professor of physics (emeritus) and perhaps by far the oldest (agewise) contributor to this blog. He got his two doctoral degrees (one in technical/engineering physics and the other in electrochemistry) in the former USSR. He has taught physics and related disciplines for more than half a century in four countries, and lives in the US since 1978. He has authored about 300 scientific papers, four books, and scores of articles on political and sociological topics published in several languages, no to mention a novel and short stories published both in Russian and English. He was awarded prizes for his scientific work, including those from the Academy of Sciences in the USSR, DAAD (the German authority on R&D) and the Royal Society of London. He became interested in debunking first the Bible code fallacy, then the publications of religious writers purportedly proving the compatibility of the Bible with science, and finally the ID concepts, after his retirement. So far he has published several articles and a book Unintelligent Design (Prometheus Books, 2004) in this vein. His lifelong hobby has been mountain climbing (Pamir, Alai, Tien-Shan, Caucasus), plus collecting Russian (and occasionally non-Russian) oral jokes, and writing a little of poetry in Russian.

Steve Reuland is a PhD student in biochemistry and molecular biology at the Medical University of South Carolina.  He holds a B.S. in Biology from the College of Charleston.

Jason Rosenhouse received his PhD in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2000.  He spent three years as a post-doc at Kansas State University and is currently an assistant professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.  He has written essays on Evolution/ID for several journals including BioScience, Evolution, and The Mathematical Intelligencer.

Timothy Sandefur is an attorney in Placerville, California, specializing in constitutional law. He is a contributing editor for Liberty magazine, and blogs regularly at Freespace. He holds a JD from Chapman University School of law and a BA in Political Economy from Hillsdale College. He is a fellow in the College of Public Interest Law at the Pacific Legal Foundation, and was a 2002 Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. In law school, he wrote a student note on the Establishment Clause implications of the accreditation of the Institute for Creation Research’s graduate school. (Dinosaur TRACS: The Approaching Conflict between Establishment Clause Jurisprudence and College Accreditation Procedures, 7 Nexus J. Op. 79 (2002)). His views as expressed on Panda’s Thumb are solely his own and do not in any way represent those of the Pacific Legal Foundation, its employees, clients, or supporters.

Jeffrey Shallit received his AB in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1979 and his Ph. D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983.  Since then he has taught at the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College. He is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.  He has a long interest in pseudoscience and pseudomathematics and has written about the intelligent design movement in Reports of the NCSE and the forthcoming book, Why Intelligent Design Fails(Edis and Young, eds.)

Tara C. Smith is an assistant professor of Epidemiology at the University of Iowa.  She holds a B.S. in Biology from Yale University.  A “temporary” stint as a technician led to a Ph.D. in microbial pathogenesis and virulence factor regulation in Streptococcus pyogenes (group A streptococcus) at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo.  She completed post-doctoral training in molecular epidemiology at the University  of Michigan.  Her current research centers on investigation of hypervariable proteins in the group B streptococcus, S. agalactiae. Other interests include microbial ecology, emerging diseases, zoonoses, and infectious causes of chronic disease.  In addition to publishing in scientific journals, she has written books on the topics of group A strep and Ebola.  She lives in rural Iowa with her husband and 2 young children.

Dave Thomas is a physicist and mathematician, employed at a small high-tech testing firm in Albuquerque, NM. He received bachelor degrees in mathematics and in physics, and a master of science in mathematics, from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where he was awarded the Brown Medal. Dave is president of the science group New Mexicans for Science and Reason, and also is a Fellow of CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), the publishers of Skeptical Inquirer. He has published several articles in Skeptical Inquirer on the Roswell and Aztec UFO Incidents, as well as on the Bible Code. Dave has also published in Scientific American (Dec. 1980 cover article), and has several patents. He received the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of Darwin Award in 2000. Dave is married, and has two sons. He enjoys playing bluegrass, and and performs juggling and magic shows for elementary schools and other groups.

John Wilkins is a philosophy of science PhD graduate who has contributed various FAQs to the TalkOrigins Archive and numerous puns to the talk.origins newsgroup. His primary interests are the evolution of culture and in particular of science, and in philosophical issues surrounding taxonomy, but he has an Opinion on everything. He has two children and a wife, all of whom know more than he does.  []

Matt Young was a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and now teaches physics and engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.  He is coeditor, with Taner Edis, of Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (Rutgers, 2004) and author of No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe (1stBooks Library, 2001), and two other books.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on March 23, 2004 | Comments (106)

"The Panda's Thumb" is many things...

First, it is an example of jury-rigged evolutionary adaptation made famous by the late Stephen Jay Gould in an essay of the same name. Second, it is the legendary virtual bar serving the community of the legendary virtual University of Ediacara somewhere in the Ediacaran hills of southern Australia, growing out of the lore of the Usenet talk.origins newsgroup. And now it is a weblog giving another voice for the defenders of the integrity of science, the patrons of "The Panda's Thumb".

Much as in any tavern serving a university community, you can expect to hear a variety of levels of discussion, ranging from the picayune to the pedantic. The authors are people associated with the virtual University of Ediacara (and thus the talk.origins newsgroup), and various web sites critical of the antievolution movement, such as the TalkOrigins Archive, TalkDesign, and Antievolution.org.

So, here's a virtual pub crawl that you might actually learn something from. We hope you find your time spent here pleasant and rewarding.