Skeptophilia

Some time around 1150 C.E. in the Faroe Islands, a comb-maker named Unås and his wife Gunnhild had a baby boy, whom they named Sverre.  Unås...

On August 14, 2003, my wife and I were returning from a trip to Hawaii.  It was a lovely vacation, but the return home was, to put it mildly...

As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in genealogy, linguistics, and evolutionary genetics, when there's a stu...

Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "There are known knowns.  These are things we know that we know.  There are known unknowns.  That is to ...

One of the best explanations of how modern evolutionary genomics is done is in the fourth chapter of Richard Dawkins's fantastic  The An...

Before I start today's post, allow me to begin with a disclaimer: I am not  claiming psychic abilities are impossible.  I am not  hostil...

I'm always drawn to a historical mystery. The difficulty, of course, is given that a huge amount of our history has either highly unreli...

Despite having taught genetics for 32 years, it still is astonishing to me that all of the genetic diversity of the 7.7-odd-billion humans o...

I'm a birdwatcher, which in my specific case kind of crosses the line into a mild mental illness.  I've traveled all over the world ...