Fear not; I'm not an esteemed oncologist. My credentials are in biological anthropology. In my training I focused on developmental plasticity and life history, which sometimes touched on the topic of cancer.

Hark A Vagrant combines erudite, smart, and funny more effectively than any other comic does. (The closest that comes to mind is the work of Roz Chast and Gary Larson.) I feel smarter, and the world seems funnier, every time I read it. Truly, it is a godly comic. (As in Zeus, Odin, Azathoth...) And grievously…

Cancer is caused by somatic mutation or epimutation. Mutation does not require solar radiation or mutagenic chemicals; it can be a wholly endogenous event caused by replication error. The more mitotic events, the higher the probability of mutation in a cell lineage and hence the higher the risk of cancer.

I Am Number Four (how many others thought "Well, number 2 is pooping so 'number 4' must be ... puking?") reeks of a product assembled without care by a marketing committee for maximum appeal to teens and twentysomethings. It's going through a checklist without regard for logic or coherence: model-pretty, supernatural…

Fifteen years ago I saw The Fountainhead starring Gary Cooper as a loon architect who blows up a housing development because the construction deviated from his specifications. Then there's the scheming intellectual who loathes the misanthropic hero because he knows that he's his better, and the woman who likes the…

Smith is being very professional about this. However, that and HarperCollins' indisputed rights aside, they're likely shooting themselves in the ass on this one. No matter what premise she was hired to write, LJ Smith put her own stamp on it with her style and creativity. That's what every fiction writer does. The…

"all available evidence indicates they were not the intellectual equals of our ancestors."

@Pope John Peeps II: I agree. del Toro just likes to fussily redesign classic monsters and give them new explanations (see: Cronos) in an attempt to confer a sense of unsettling unfamiliarity. The problem is that del Toro's sensibilities, both in terms of backstory and design, is by now so familiar for audiences…

One thing that I like about this show is that even the "good" characters are morally compromised (enabling Damon, the murder of Mason) and the "bad" ones show traces of compassion or at least sorrow. They're conflicted and their personalities have changed over time, in ways that make sense given their experiences.

While this is far from the worst CGIzation of a familiar cartoon character (Garfield, I'm looking at you), they all remind me of when Breathed started drawing

For those who fail to recognize the greatness of Demolition Man, I have one question: "What seems to be your boggle?"

@Gonza: Sure they can have kids.

Another creepy movie scarecrow: Sam from the awesome anthology Trick 'r Treat (featuring Anna Paquin).

Even those who hated Stallone's Judge Dredd have to admit that this design blows.

@An_Enemy: Kudos for the Wisdom Of Crocodiles mention! (Also known by the more generic title Immortality.) It's a great case study of dating/relationship manipulation. The second most underrated vampire movie ever. (The most underrated - and under-viewed - vampire movie is the perfect horror film Black Sunday.)

Speaking of Corman, I just watched his House of Usher, starring Vincent Price and scripted by Robert Matheson (the genre god whose short story inspired the upcoming Real Steel). House of Usher is terrific and not campy at all, a classic to place next to literary adaptations like The Picture of Dorian Gray (the one…

@Yankton: Good example!

@Zadkiel: How could I forget! The designs of The Thing were revolutionary and the forefather of most of these.

While the designers of the necromorphs deserve kudos, let's acknowledge some precursors (whether they influenced these designs or not):

Sure, selection is evolutionarily important, and it's edifying to point to clear examples of selection on traits, both in real time field studies of organisms with short life spans and in the fossil record. And there are plenty of them.