Right. So, yesterday was annoying. After a week of more or less total inactivity, I wrote two most excellent paragraphs on the evolution of human facial attractiveness only to have them swallowed by my normally very reliable computer. In order to make myself feel at least a little productive, I decided to catch up with the blog postings and, suiting action to thought, I wrote a lengthy post about stuff. I hit submit… and the internet ate it.

I left work at that point.

Anyway, today I at least seem able to string coherent sentences together so maybe it’s no bad thing. Here’s some gubbins, trying to make good on my thematic promise for this blog…

Recently I came across this group advertising for CV’s . They’re a science communication consultancy called Proof Communication based down in London. They represent an angle of science comm that I hadn’t really considered. As I understand it, they are hired by companies, universities or individuals to help make specialist areas of science understandable to a lay audience. They help write press releases, articles, help design presentations and even consult on tv and movie scripts. Looked kind of exciting. Anyway, I sent them my CV but no immediate joy. They did, however, offer me a coffee next time I’m in the vicinity, so that’s something.

There’s a lot of interest among various science blogs about the Atlas of Creation by a Turkish gentleman called Harun Yahya. It’s a creationist tract, differing from most only in the sheer amount of money that’s been spent on its production and on the posting of it to senior academics, of a science and evolution bent, around the World. I am priveleged enough to have seen a copy after my supervisor was sent one a few months back. It really is an amazing object. It’s really big and glossy and has those plastic-coated pictures of animals that move when you tilt them on the front; the things that normally appear on children’s nature books, or rulers based on cartoon series. The book itself is full of some really wonderful pictures of various fossils and life forms. Massive pictures of chunks of amber, fish, all sorts of things that actually are a pleasure to look at. The problem is the small paragraphs of text that appear next to the images that are so predictable in their creationist rantings that they make you alternately hoot with hysterical laughter and hang your head and weep. My own personal favourite are the photoshopped pictures of ‘mutant’ human skulls. They have very exciting mutations; 5 spinal columns, for example, or an eye socket in the occipital plate of the skull. The point? Well, if mutation drives evolution, why don’t we see forms like this in the fossil record?

Yes, well. That’s me converted.

So, at the beginning of next month I’m doing my own battle with the rise of irrationality at the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth in the University of Durham . I’ve been teaching Biological Anthropology (my first discipline) there for four (or is it five?) years now and it’s always fun. We get a group of 20 or so bright, enthusiastic, 11-16 year olds for 2 weeks and teach them what we consider to be the basics of our discipline, as well as bits and pieces of our individual specialities. From me, they get evolution, fossil hominids, basic primatology, some selfish gene stuff and, of course, human mating strategy and attractiveness. I’m part of a general Anthropology course, so they get Social Anth as well. I get a big kick out of it, and really enjoy encouraging scientific thought and a spirit of rational enquiry in the kids. Anyway, that’ll be fun.

Right, me and a chum are off to read the last chapter of the new Harry Potter book. Having not read any of the preceeding books, I am looking forward to this immensely. Hooray.