"Twinkling Stars May Reveal Human-Size Wormholes."

May!

"Funny, only a few months ago [Obama] said his opponents talk about him like a dog."

"Now he is talking about himself, like a dog, but of the blue variety."

"It's like Charles Darwin and his theory is a saint. You can't touch it."

Some Louisiana citizens think the Louisiana textbook advisory panel isn't doing a good enough job of implementing the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008.

The LSEA instructs educators to promote "critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." It also allows teachers and school districts to use "supplemental textbooks," which are just code words for creationist and pro-intelligent design materials.

"If members have homosexual thoughts or feelings or engage in homosexual behavior..."

"... Church leaders should help them have a clear understanding of faith in Jesus Christ, the process of repentance, and the purpose of life on earth."

"Why are liberals more intelligent than conservatives? Because liberalism is 'evolutionarily novel.'"

Says the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa:

[Kanazawa's study] showed that young adults who identified themselves as "very liberal" had an average IQ of 106 while those who identified themselves as "very conservative" had an average IQ of 95.

"The ability to think and reason endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions. As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognise and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles," Dr Kanazawa said.

Humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends. Being liberal and caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Evolutionary psychologists certainly have a lot of leeway to explain anything that they see in the data and to pick the explanation that pleases them the most.

The study is of young adults. Intelligent young adults might be liberal because they are going to better schools, and schools promote the liberal world view. What happens when these intelligent folks — and they're not that intelligent! — get a little older?

The linked article summarizes the material in the book "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire-- Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do." I read that book a while back. It's pretty interesting.

As the male ousts the female from the Speaker's chair....

... he chivalrously provides all the ladies of the House with  very important seats.

Toilets.

But I'm sure Nancy Pelosi has her own private bathroom and wouldn't stoop (or squat) to use some shared bathroom.

"If Charles Darwin were alive today, I think he would find something very attractive about punk rock."

Writes Greg Graffin in "Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without God." Graffin was (is?) the lead singer of the rock group Bad Religion and he's now a professor of life Sciences at UCLA.

At 16, he took the final words from Richard Leakey's and Roger Lewin's book, "Origins" ("To have arrived on this Earth ... only to depart it through arrogance, would be the ultimate irony") as inspiration for Bad Religion's first noteworthy song, "We're Only Going to Die from Our Own Arrogance." It was recorded for the band's 1981 debut album....

In his book, Graffin says a detailed study of evolution led him to become a "naturalist," a scientist who believes the overall story of species' development or failure is more complex than "survival of the fittest."...

Organisms, Graffin says, adapt, for better or worse, to changes in their environment and to the constant absorption of new traits through procreation. Evolution is anarchic — something, he says, is true of punk culture as well as the world at large.