The blogroll is on the main page of my blog and links to various other sites that I consider worth reading. The sites which were on there were from many years ago and included several which I no longer read. When I noticed that, I saw that it was time to update it. Here’s a new list of blogs which are worth reading. Go check them out.
Animal Emotions is written by Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, United States and co-founder of the Jane Goodall Institute of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (ethology being the study of animal behaviour). The blog deals with various aspects of animal behaviour, welfare and ethics.
This is the blog for the laboratory of Jeff Bowman from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US. This is a blog that I started following more recently to get a wider view of microbial ecology. The Bowman lab works on different aspects of microbial ecology with many posts focussing on analytical tools as well as marine and polar microbial ecology.
Data Colada is a collaboration between three authors; Uri Simonsohn, Professor of Behavioral Science at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, Leif D. Nelson, Professor of Business Administration & Marketing at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, United States and Joseph Simmons, Dorothy Silberberg Professor of Applied Statistics and Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions, both at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, United States. The posts tend to focus on statistics and social science research, particularly whether published effects can be reproduced.
This one is also run by a triumvirate of authors; Jeremy Fox, Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, Canada, Brian McGill, Professor of Biological Science at the University of Maine, United States and Meghan Duffy, Professor at the University of Michigan, United States. They wrote about a huge array of topics and, while they have sort-of stopped, they still seem to post more regularly than I do.
I’m lumping these two together because they are very similar and both come from the Free Software Foundation. As I’ve previously written, I am a supporter of free software and this is an organisation which has been promoting free software since 1985. The two feeds contain all sorts of information on free software and the FSF’s campaigns.
Sandwalk is written by Larry Moran, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto, Canada, and is a blog which I have followed for many, many years. It’s a great blog for biochemistry and genomics posts, even helping inspire my own post on the central dogma in 2018. Prof. Moran is a strong proponent of genetic drift in evolution which means he has a very different perspective to some other scientists I follow, such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, who are both adaptationists.
I found this blog through Dynamic Ecology and it is written by Stephen B. Heard, a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. While Prof. Heard is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, I don’t see those topics reflected much on the blog. It seems to focus more on the scientific process and scientific writing.
This is a fairly new blog by Michael Shermer, a writer and historian of science, although it is technically a continuation of his Scientific American column which ended in January 2019. He has written several books on science and scepticism and is the co-founder of The Skeptics Society. I’m not actually all that familiar with his writing, so this is new for me too, but I think it should at least be interesting.
We again shift to social sciences with this offering from Kevin Dorst, Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department of the University of Pittsburgh, United States. In contrast to a lot of social scientists, he believes that humans are not all irrational and that political polarisation can be rational. His blog is intended to provide the arguments and evidence to support that position.
Along with Sandwalk and Why Evolution is True, this is an entry that has been on my blogroll probably since the beginning. Synapses is written by Jacques Rousseau who teaches critical thinking at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. A lot of his posts revolve around South African politics and, while I do not quite share his opinions, they are worth reading. His podcast, Square Brackets, co-hosted with Greg Andrews, a former Methodist minister, was great but, unfortunately, is on hiatus with no current plans for revival.
The last, and one of my long-time reads, WEIT is written by Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, United States. His website (among his quirks is a dislike for the term “blog”) was originally established as a companion piece for his book of the same name. Back then, it mostly covered evolution and religion. Over time, the focus has shifted and at the moment, it is primarily documenting the problems of woke ideology (several linked beliefs which are generally well-meaning but, at best, have only a distant relationship to reality) which is spreading in left-wing politics in the US and, unfortunately, being exported to the rest of the world.
Evidence & Reason 