I've reviewed a few books over the years here at Quintessence of Dust , but From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris was the first book I blogged through that I was genuinely excited about reading.

1. Get your genome sequenced for $48,000. I would so do this. In the meantime, we bought the Matheson family DNA test for my dad for Father's Day. I'm following this series at Siris: Philosophical Sentences explained. You know the old chestnuts: Cogito ergo sum, God is dead, virtue is its own reward, cleanliness is next to godliness... heh. Brandon tells us where they came from and a little about them.

I previously posted the abstract of a talk I gave at Calvin last month in which I test-drove my "theistic embryology" metaphor that I'll present at the North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati in two weeks. Now the audio and my simple slides are posted on Calvin's e-zine, Minds in the Making. Lots of jokes. And now my name's spelled right. About halfway through, I refer to "10 dangers of theistic evolution" at Answers in Genesis.

Get it? Heh. Anyway, go to Clashing Culture to see further discussion of the TE test.

Okay, so not really weekly. John Farrell has an interesting discussion of protein folding as a problem or challenge for evolutionary theory. His post includes quotes from experts with whom he has corresponded, and he cites the primary literature.

It was a week of celebration and remembrance. There was a major birthday. And celebrations of that day of the first fruits of bigger things, in unlikely places like Florida and Arizona. It's all very exciting.

Hello and welcome to the 28th edition of the genetics blog carnival known as Mendel's Garden, where we celebrate blogging on topics related to anything touching on what Mendel discovered (or thought he discovered). While reading these interesting and informative pieces, please think about work that should be featured in a future edition and/or blogs (like yours) that would serve well as future hosts. So do tomato seeds get you excited? No? Oh.

Well, it's the first sampler since June, but I won't try to make up for lost time. Todd Wood has started a blog, and it's excellent. His slant is unique -- he's a young-earth creationist -- but his writing is superb and his expertise in genetics and genomics is world-class. My favorite entry so far: a commentary on a recent report describing genetic variation among humans.

I've mentioned before that we've had an intelligent design proponent (code named Timaeus) as an official guest on the ASA email list. The discussion has been mostly useful. One thing that became clear early on was the fact that Timaeus is not a scientist and has not read much science outside of the works of ID defenders.

It is understandably typical for Christians to consider evolution as something that confronts and challenges faith. To say that North American evangelicals consider evolution to be largely incompatible with Christian belief is to state the painfully obvious.