Feathers.

It was particularly telling that when Dawkins addressed the relevance of DNA to evolution he interviewed Craig Venter rather than Francis Collins. Why? Because Francis Collins, the director of the human genome project, who together with Venter sequenced the human genome, is also an orthodox Christian. He believes entirely in Darwinian evolution, but he also believes in a creator God who brought the diversity of life into being by means of evolution.

Hamlet (Facebook news feed edition).

via Paferrobyday.

In 1994, 51.8% of British men and 50.7% of British women agreed with the proposition that “a family does not suffer if a woman is in full-time employment”. By 2002, the proportions fell to 42.2% of men and 46.5% of women.

It’s interesting to note that in 1994 men were more emancipated than women.

(Anyway, I only hope that the trend will change again as soon as possible…)

via Boing Boing.

“I think magicians and cognitive neuroscientists are getting at similar questions, but while neuroscientists have been looking at this for a few decades, magicians have been looking at this for centuries, millennia probably,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and coauthor of one of the studies, published online last week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. “What magicians do is light-years ahead in terms of sophistication and the power of these techniques.”

…

“In magic,” says Teller, half of the well-known duo Penn & Teller and one of five magicians credited as coauthors of the Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper, “we tend to take the things that make us smart as human beings and turn those against us.”