Incidentally, that's also the Ttr;mmwtjmewafpwitafihoa* version.

Personally, I think storymark's opinion is more important than yours because he (or she) can express it coherently and back it up with reason and evidence. Which is a lot more than you've shown yourself capable of in this thread.

And what would the IRS consider as her purchase price? Because if it's zero, she's gonna have a hell of a capital gain realized once she sells it.

"Totally should of been an English lit major."

Part 2 of Coyne's critique:http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/

Huh. Professor at FSU. Nice to see McNutty got off the patrol boat.

Error!

I was just about to post the Coyne piece. Now Pinker is laying into Dobbs on twitter. The pitchforks are out.

Should there be an edit to reflect that Dobbs has issued a substantial mea culpa?http://daviddobbs.net/smoothpebbles/…

Oh, and to be servicey, here's the pithiest summary of genetic accommodation I've found:

My question regarding genetic assimilation is how did phenotypic plasticity arise in the first place? To answer phenotype selection seems to be begging the question. I can't yet quite see how the irreducible unit isn't the gene.

I'm a fan of Dobbs generally, but I thought this was pretty shoddy work. There's been some good discussion as to why on PZ Meyer's blog:

Yeah, they were certainly the most common crab I'd find when cruising tide pools 25 years ago. I'm surprised at the "no natural predators" claim as I thought seagulls went after them, and we definitely used them for bait.

That's pretty cool, but it's only about twice the speed that a decent high school pitcher could throw coins or a significantly heavier object at, with a very limited ability to reload. As far as threats go, it's somewhere down the line behind a strong person with a sturdy pen.

You're under-thinking this. It's unlikely she's dead. Everything about that scene read missing-but-alive. Herschel was the big impact death of the episode, I doubt they'd ambiguously kill off Judith in the same episode as it would have a severly blunted emotional impact. If/when she dies, it will be certain and…

It can be both. In fact, I'd bet on it being both.

Amateur.

I haven't yet read Guns, Germs and Steel or Collapse, but I read Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee many years ago and thought it was fantastic, truly one of the books that changed the way I looked at the world. If the criticisms many seem to have with him extend to his work in The Third Chimpanzee, I'd be interested to…

Yes, it illustrates the well-documented and massively influential Great Migration quite well.

Oof, that was ugly. This is a good summary: