Natural Selection:
Natural Selection was proposed jointly by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin on this day 150 years ago. Darwin discovered the principle of Natural Selection, and worked it out, over several decades prior. Meanwhile A.R. Wallace also came up with Natural Selection as the mechanism...
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Posted on July 1, 2008 7:29 AM • 1 Comments •
Proto Stephen Jay Gould OMFSM you are not going to believe this. Over at the University of Chicago, someone is making a terrible fool of themselves. It is hard to say if this is Shankar Vedantam, the Washing Post Staff Writer, or Patterson Clark...
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Posted on June 29, 2008 4:58 PM • 14 Comments •
There is new information from an older idea (from about 2000) by Paul Sherman and colleagues. The idea underlying this research is simple: Symptoms of illnesses may be adaptive. Indeed, this may be true to the extent that we should not call certain things illnesses....
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Posted on June 28, 2008 12:25 PM • 23 Comments •
The Evolution 2008 conference started out today with a special program for K-12 teachers (mainly life science teachers) organized by the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education (MNCSE). The opening speaker was Scott Lanyon, director of the Bell Museum of Natural History. (The Bell hosted this...
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Posted on June 20, 2008 10:26 PM • 26 Comments •
Good question ... what IS in the air? The simple answer is that the air ... the Earth's atmosphere ... is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there's dirt. I want to talk a...
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Posted on April 18, 2008 4:08 PM • 7 Comments •
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.... Welcome to the Lucky 13th Edition of The Boneyard ... the Web Carnival about Bones and Stuff. "The Boneyard is a blog carnival covering all things paleo, from dinosaurs to pollen to hominids and everywhere in between. It's held every two weeks (the...
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Posted on April 6, 2008 10:23 PM • 1 Comments •
A common presumption is that behavior is part of phenotype, and since phenotype arises from genotype (plus/minus Reaction Norm), that there can be a study of "behavioral genetics." This is certainly an overstatement (or oversimplification) for organisms with extensive and/or complex neural systems, such as...
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Posted on March 22, 2008 8:05 PM • 5 Comments •
Jonathan Wells has launched a nasty attack on PZ Myers and Ian Musgrave on the discredited Discovery Institute web site....
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Posted on March 5, 2008 8:34 AM • 8 Comments •
From whence the humble chicken? Gallus gallus is a domesticated chicken-like bird (thus, the name "chicken") that originates in southeast Asia. Ever since Darwin we've known that the chicken originated in southeast Asia, although the exact details of which one or more of several possible...
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Posted on February 29, 2008 5:48 PM • 12 Comments •
PZ Myers notes that Ken Miller is making a case for the term design in evolutionary biology. Miller simply claims that "design" comes from the usual, expected evolutionary processes (Natural Selection, etc.). PZ is not buying this bill of goods, and neither am I. One...
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Posted on February 23, 2008 9:52 AM • 0 Comments •
