Robert Sapolsky: The brilliant thing I've seen in a while.

I understand that not everybody shares my interests in the most boring and stupid things. So here's some awesome. I know nobody reads this, but I'd hate to keep subjecting you to things that are admittedly completely stupid.

Primate Fossil being pitched as the second coming of Christ, hurting the cause.

The fossil is admittedly really cool. It certainly is up there with some other impressive fossils and it could shed some light on primate ancestry but in many other ways it's not as cool as tiktaalik or archeopteryx. It really does look like a monkey. It might shed some light on primate evolution and thus our evolution but then so did Tiktaalik, and I wasn't joking in the title. It's actually being hyped as the second coming of Christ. One of the dates listed in the hyperbolic advertisement for the program was 0AD. Despite the fact that there was no 0AD, it's a pretty clear reference to Jesus and putting this up there with the importance of the supposed date of the birth of a mythological character during the time when both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew rule out as a supportable birth year (after 4CE Herod the great isn't alive to murder the children, before 7AD there's no supposed Roman governor to order a census).

So when creationists chime back in and point out that it's one fossil that looked like a monkey and that's where all the damned evolutionists put their marbles in one last grasp to try and justify their "made from nothing" theory... they will be partially right. The hype is massively overblown.

Not important enough to warrant rage at the time. But Bill O' is a moron...

Back a month or so ago, Bill O'Reily was whining about how somebody on Daily Kos called the pope a Primate. This was pretty pathetic even for him. There are three definitions of primate given by Merriam-Webster's dictionary for 'primate'. The pope meets all three.

1 often capitalized : a bishop who has precedence in a province, a group of provinces, or a nation
2 archaic : one first in authority or rank : LEADER
3 [New Latin Primates, from Latin, plural of primat-, primas] : any of an order (Primates) of mammals that are characterized especially by advanced development of binocular vision, specialization of the appendages for grasping, and enlargement of the cerebral hemispheres and that include humans, apes, monkeys, and related forms (as lemurs and tarsiers)

The Pope is the Primate of Italy, the first in authority, and a member of the order of primates as are all humans.