Charles Darwin collected all sorts of cool stuff (like a vampire bat, caught while feeding on his horse) on his journey aboard the Beagle, and it has to be said that he understood little of it until after he got back. The finches that bear his name were identified as such by someone else, and his own bird collections from the Galapagos were nearly worthless due to the fact that he hadn't bothered to label specimens as to their place of origin.

The wing of a bat is an amazing thing. It's not just a wing; it's clearly a modified mammalian limb. A bat looks like a lot like a rodent with really long, webbed fingers on elongated arms. Image from Animal Diversity Web at the University of Michigan.

It'll be a breakout week after a slow month on the blog. To the Edge of Evolution – and beyond!1. Ian Musgrave over at Panda's Thumb provides a nice summary of the evolution of clotting systems and some new genomic data that could be used, by ID proponents like Michael Behe, to bolster their claims regarding the "irreducible complexity" of the clotting system.

Last quiz on genome size, with animals chosen at random. The first quiz post explains what this is all about, the second one has additional commentary, and the answers to both previous quizzes are in previous Weekly samplers.Which organism has the larger genome? This one? Or this one? 1 234Here's some help for you.

Quiz 2. (Directions, and rationale, can be found in a previous post.) Ready?Which organism has the larger genome? This one? Or this one? 1 2 3Which of these organisms displays the greatest "degree of advancement"? Which would require the most "information" to build and maintain? What predictions would design theorists such as William Dembski and Hugh Ross offer us in this exercise?Think, people.

That's Tom de Kay, editor of the Home & Garden section of the New York Times. Last week Thursday, that section ran a story, "A Refugee from Gangland," describing the life of Margaret B. Jones, the author of a just-released "heart-wrenching memoir" set in gangland L.A. The Times piece is fascinating, and the memoir probably is too. One little problem: the memoir has just been revealed to be a fraud.

Can you tell which of the authors quoted above won a Pulitzer? Heh.Back to the big lie about "junk DNA" as told by anti-evolution propagandists. The first theme in this cesspool of creationist folk science, as I described in the first installment of this series on "junk DNA", is this: that "junk DNA" is functional and therefore that evolutionary claims regarding its origin are mistaken.

Several weeks ago, I started this series on "junk DNA" by noting that the shoddy nature of anti-evolution folk science is rarely more clearly displayed than in discussions of genomic and genetic findings that are aptly explained by common descent.

In another post in this ongoing series, we looked at creationist distortions of the nature of research into non-coding DNA, or "junk DNA." There I mention how creationists of all stripes are quite fond of the claim that "Darwinist" assumptions led to the labeling of all non-coding DNA as non-functional, and thereby to the neglect of research in the field for three decades.

This week's theme is, um, "fun with biology." Seemed apropos after all the bickering I did this week. Which I'll mention as well.1. So I assume you saw that Craig Venter's outfit produced the first "synthetic genome" recently. All this means is that they synthesized a very long piece of DNA, and included within it all the components known to be necessary for bacterial life.