Wow! Have I been out of touch!

I know I haven't been posting much lately, but you know it's bad when I forget to celebrate Charles Darwin's birthday!  Which, if you don't know was on February 12th.  As a biologist, I owe everything to Darwin's theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.  Without it, not only would I have a hard time coming up with hypotheses (i.e. good ideas to test), but so much of genetics and developmental biology (which heavily inform my current work) would likely be decades behind where they are today.  Though others have certainly done Darwin much greater honor on his birthday (by putting him on currency, or making beer in his honor) tonight I will honor the father of modern biology by drinking a celebratory beer or two and, of course, by putting a silly picture of him up here on the blog

Happy Birthday, Charles!

(At Left: Charles Darwin in proper birthday attire.
At right: On of our dogs, Charles Robert Darwin Walters, though we just call him Charlie)

A great collection of studies on why we believe and do things that are irrational

So, it's a few years old, but I just came across this post over at Psyblog...
http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/11/10-piercing-insights-into-human-nature.php

It's a nice little collection of summaries pertaining to some interesting psychological phenomena.