Welcome everybody to the 117th edition of the blogosphere’s premiere science and medicine blogcarnival, Tangled Bank. Tangled Bank started out as a sort of Carnival of the Vanities for science bloggers taking it’s name from Charles Darwin’s famous metaphor:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.

It’s fitting that this edition should itself present such a tangled bank of blog posts intertwining many different fields of science and medicine. Unfortunately, that means it becomes almost impossible to find a common theme or even group together the posts in any meaningful way. So I’m going to take the easy way out and simply list them in no particular order, although we’ll try to group related posts together.

My suggestion to the reader is to wander through the blog posts, taking your time, and stopping here and there to smell a beautiful flower here and there or observe a particularly fascinating animal or insect along the bank. After a while, after taking in everything there is to see, maybe sit down and rest for a while by reading two or three, or even all of the fine blog posts contained herein. There’s no hurry. You’ve got two whole weeks until the next edition after all.

Starting things off, Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life presents us with two posts: Endangered Cockatoo Species Rediscovered in Indonesia and Research Suggests Bipolar Children Likely to become Bipolar Adults

And Grrlscientist wasn’t the only one thinking about birds this biweek. _PaddyK_ gives us a Myth of the day (part 1) (a myth about birds) and 10,000 Birds tells us about Forpus passerinus and the Ornithologists of Masaguaral

I wonder if birds would like these Superworms! that Great Auk - or Greatest Auk? writes about?

Maybe not, but the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog tells us about some tomatoes that mice should find delicious in Purple tomatoes for longer life — if you’re a mouse.

Busting another myth is Stochastic Scribbles with Sound In Space.

Being the last Tangled Bank before election day and the current moronic fundie is ousted from his roost (or “doomsday” as one right-wing fundamentalist Christian I know of called it), there were naturally a few politically oriented posts. Capitol Annex informs us of Texas scientists who are organizing to fight the watering down of science instruction with Texas Scientists Denounce State Board of Educations Attempts To Water Down Evolution Instruction while Highlight Health lets us know where the candidates stand with 2008 Presidential Candidates on the Issues of Biomedical Research and Healthcare. And Submitted to a Candid World gives us Summary Judgment: McCain’s Legal Errors at the Debate, and Why They Matter (Part 1: Abortion & “Health”).

And speaking of politics, here’s two posts about Palin and fruit flies. Eclectic Echoes gives us Palin, Fruit Flies and Autism while En Tequila Es Verdad brings forth Flies like us.

Where would Tangled Bank be without blog posts about evolution? Several were submitted this time. Starting the evolution themed posts off, the evolving mind has Family Resemblance and Grrlscientist tells us what the ‘Fishapod’ Fossil Provides More Clues for the Evolution of Terrestriality and Pleiotropy shows us that Development shapes evolution in silico. The Behe Fails Weblog presents Evolution of Adaptive Immunity IV–”Lawful”* accidents of heredity visible in adaptive immunity while For The Sake Of Science puts to rest an old Creationist trope with Why Natural Selection is Not Random. And last but not least, Greg Laden turns our attention to another kind of evolution in Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting.

Next up we have a handful of neuroscience and psychology posts. Sharp Brains brings us an interview with Michael Posner in Training Attention and Emotional Self-Regulation and Ouroboros tells us how our thoughts can affect our health with An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but beware of intrusive thoughts. It’s Alive is using his brain to ponder Sex, what is it good for? and rounding out the brainy part of this edition of Tangled Bank, we have a pair of posts from Neurotopia: Remember the Old Days? and It’s not the size that counts, it’s how you use it!.

And leaving behind the microcosm we’ll shift our focus to world beneath our feet with Balancing Life’s post Life in the center of the earth (almost) and  En Tequilla Ed Verdad’s second appearance in TB #117, Two Billion Years of History.

Rounding out this edition of Tangled Bank, Kelosophy muses mathematically about a question that I think is answered daily by right wing bloggers everywhere in There’s a monkey sitting at a typewriter.

That’s it for this biweek’s edition of Tangled Bank! I hope you enjoyed perusing these wonderful specimens of the science blogging world as much as I did while putting together this edition of what is probably one of the ten best blog carnivals on the web. Keep an eye on Pharygula to find where next you might come across the Tangled Bank. Oh, and if you’ll permit me a little self-promotion for the little blog carnival that I run… Should you find yourself on the left side of the political aisle, or you’re just curious what all those vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the left are saying after the election, then check out the next edition of Carnival of the Liberals on Friday, November 7th at The Lay Scientist.