"The answer, say two biologists, may actually have to do with their intended function. "

I like to think that the circumstances around the development of evolution made the timescale of its broad acceptance what it was. The rate of information transfer between academia and the general public was much, much slower than it is today, and people simply weren't educated enough in broad swathes of the 1859-2012…

"Right, but don't you think that there will always be the "why" question? Most truths of this nature come from a place of Assumption+Data=Truth. But people will always question the assumption part, and place God in the gap. "

@VitorRufino: I'm terribly sorry, but could you translate that into English please? It seems you've put a lot of effort into writing this out, but I'm afraid the process of feeding it into Google Translate will strip out a lot of the nuance out of it, if not make it unintelligible entirely, which would, of course,…

@Matt McC: True. Though, in my mind, science doesn't necessarily have to be limitless to disprove any particularly cohesive meanings of 'God', it just has to get far enough so as to make the existence of God or gods a matter of philosophy and, in effect, personal preference alone - making the notion of the empirical…

w/ regards to the question 'Is there a God?', while we may not be able to empirically disprove all definitions of said deity, we can disprove entire classes of definitions, including most of the active deities (ie Old Testament Yahweh, Zeus, Ra, etc), since, by definition, they *do* make testable predictions about…

As mentioned below (Or above? Sideways maybe? Oh god, I don't even know with Kinja anymore), it's a quote from the Scott Pilgrim movie/comic book.

Err, no, the blog actually agree with what I said; mice are indeed good models, but they're not *perfect* models for human biology - no one organism is. They're a stepping stone to more detailed research, and scientists have to (And broadly do) keep in mind their limitations.

"Rats are simpler organisms than humans, so hypothetical carcinogen effects of GM food may be less severe in humans."

Why would they get killed or be in hiding, though? One would think that they (Presumably engineers and such?) would be one of the most important, well-protected classes of people on the planet, given that they're the only ones that can build said technology. Same with the doctors, nurses, other educated professionals…

Right, I think I remember reading about this in class (Either that or it was in the 'This Week in Microbiology' podcast I listen to); people generally just get flu-like symptoms (fever, lethargy, aches and pains, etc) early in the infection, and most disregard it as a normal 'flu' and carry on. Then, of course, when…

"The fact is that no one knows for sure how plague spreads.If anyone tells you they do, they are lying. Plague is endemic to the American Southwest. It is believed to be carried by fleas, but no one is really positive."

Pretty much, yeah. Plus I don't think feathered animatronic dinosaurs would look very good, given the constraints of movement that exist.

There are lots of genuine criticisms of evolutionary psychology, often from very real and very serious scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. I don't like it as a student of biology, for example, because it invites a lot of speculatory navel-gazing without any real biological modes of action - ie…

I think the idea is that if the precepts of evolutionary psychology were true, then the 'evolutionarily driven' desires of each sex in a mate as put forward by the evopsych people should be universal and homogenous, regardless of country.

I didn't think it was possible, but I think Capcom just might have formulated the most generic cyperpunk setting ever imagined. I can't think of a single thing about this game that hasn't been done better elsewhere in fiction or video games, and which 'Remember Me' hasn't decided to resurrect and suck the personality…

There is absolutely no way that pertussis can be spread by vaccines. Modern pertussis vaccines contain purified pertussis antigens (Surface proteins of the cell wall of the bacteria in this case, if memory serves) only - there are no full cells, DNA or RNA in the vaccines themselves, and thus you cannot catch the…

I was more referring to their track record with discovery announcements rather than other events.

Let's hope this one is a little more credible than the last major press conference NASA held.

"Atheistic evolutionism is by definition and in essence a faith without a deity."