Too Much Anthro: Blog and Site Reviews and Links

This week, I’ve decided to spend a bit of time on my linkroll. All of the sites I speak of will have corresponding links in the linkroll section of my sidebar. As I was cruising the anthroblogs for pages with particularly interesting content, I found that many blogs have been chatting as of late about Ben Stein’s new movie about intelligent design, Expelled. What they’ve been discussing more particularly is that there was a screening of Expelled at BIOLA that was attended by Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, from which PZ was thrown out. As such, quite a few of the links this week will be about this frightening occasion. One link is the “Expelled” movie website so you can enjoy intelligent design with Ben Stein in all its glory. Aesthetically, it’s rather pretty with high quality graphics and some amount of time having been spent on the composition of the site and placement of the elements themselves. Sadly, though, it’s about intelligent design! Which, in this case, means that content is considerably lacking. The website Expelled Exposed is the next on the list, and it is, in essence a rebuttal to Ben Stein’s film. This site is not really about appearance, though it is ok to look at and very easy to navigate. It is all about content and extremely rich in this regard. It has some great links to recent news articles concerning intelligent design, creationism and the claims made in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. While we’re on the issue of creationism, let us not forget that the editor of Scientific American magazine, John Rennie wrote an article called 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense which is a must for anybody who needs to brush up on creationism and science. Oh, and for those of you who are a little rusty when it comes to the family tree check out this link.

The official website of Richard Dawkins, world famous evolutionary biologist is up next. In contrast to the Expelled site, this one is content rich, maintains a forum and various social networking boards and applications for those who wish to participate and has an easily manageable interface. The blog of PZ Myers, beloved biologist and vehement critic of creationism has also been added. The content is engaging, humorous and, well, very distinct. Another blog of note, is Afarensis, my favorite anthroblog. The writer is witty, fun and knowledgeable. He posts on a variety of areas within the discipline of anthropology, is informative and well spoken about issues. Also, he holds active dialogues with his readers, which tends to enrich the website, make it more accessible and, in a way, make me feel as though I’m part of a community though I’ve never contributed. Hm…Monkey News is a pretty cool site which also follows news stories, though it never puts up opinion pieces. Odds are that if a story was published in English language newspapers, this website has reprinted it with a link back to the source. It’s pretty amazing for all things primate related. One problem is that there are so many advertisements that it makes finding the archived material and suggested links a little difficult. On the subject of primates, Bonobo Handshake has some amazing photos of orphaned bonobo babies, children and youth but not very much by way of recent written content. And the last link for the week is Panda’s Thumb, a pretty sweet site with tons of contributors speaking on various issues concerning science and evolution that is easy to navigate and a good place to check out if you want to hear varying perspectives from lots of different individuals.