Yikes! A newish follower of PT, Robert Dullien, has just notified us that today is National Panda Day. You can celebrate it by following the link above to the World Wildlife Federation’s National Panda Day website. The WWF invites you as follows:

ON THIS DAY WE CELEBRATE PANDAS!

To coincide with National Panda Day, we’d like to invite you to get to know more about this amazing species. We've got some simple and fun ways to show your support; from learning more about pandas, to baking a panda cake!

Activities include an article on how the panda was possibly saved from extinction, to a quiz, top 10 facts about pandas, a drawing by Andy Robert Davies to be colored by a child, young or old, and more.

Our thanks to Mr. Dullien for being so alert!

Max Telford, who is Professor in the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment at University College, London, has written an engaging book, The Tree of Life: Solving Science’s Greatest Puzzle, which has stirred up reactions at the Discovery Institute site Science And Culture Today. (I have not yet read Telford’s book, except to find a passage where he mentions me, saying that when he attended a lecture by me years ago he found me terrifying. Sorry about that.)

The conclusion that there is a treelike genealogy of life is about 250 years old, starting to gain acceptance even before Darwin’s work. It is central to modern biology.

But this is not the impression you’d get if all you read was the Discovery Institute’s website Science and Culture Today. Instead you’d find Emily Reeves, who describes herself as “a biochemist, metabolic nutritionist, and aspiring systems biologist” questioning the conclusion that there is such a genealogy, in two posts responding to Telford’s book. And even before that, posts by Rob Stadler, a biomedical engineer, concluded that the evidence from homology did not support the conclusion that it came from common ancestry.

What is particularly interesting is that this seems to signal the Discovery Institute’s shifting from arguing that Intelligent Design is detectable in evolution, to arguing that common ancestry is not detectable.

Here are some indications:

Continue Reading

Remarkable pictures of drawings made by some of Darwin’s children on the backs of discarded manuscript pages, presumably either drafts or material that had already been typeset, posted by the website Flashbak.

Flashbak describes itself as “a digital collection of thousands of wonderful pictures, stories, letters, sounds and movies from across the past, with one aim – to make the past come alive.” They also sell photographs and prints. They credit the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, which in turn credits a collaboration with the Cambridge University Library.

Thanks to Burt Humburg for the link.

Total eclipse of the moon tonight or, technically, I suppose, tomorrow morning. According to Time and Date, here in Boulder, totality will begin around 4 a.m. and end at 5. If you do not count the penumbra, we will see the entire eclipse, though it will be twilight before the end. Likewise, the entire eclipse will be seen in the Pacific Ocean, as well as much of western North America and eastern Russia, Japan, New Zealand, and eastern Australia. Dimming of the light during the penumbral phase is too faint to be seen visually.