Species article online

The NCSE has put up more of its content from it's excellent, if badly laid out, magazine Reports of the NCSE. As a result, one of my better pieces, on species concepts, is now up, with a list of what I at the time thought were the concepts in the modern literature, derived from Mayden's 1997 piece. I would revise the phylogenetic concepts somewhat, but the citations are still useful. Also go check out the revised NCSE website. It has lots of useful links about antievolutionism and evolution. And happy birthday to Genie...

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Here is a working list of species concepts presently in play. I quote "Concepts" above because, for philosophical reasons, I think there is only one concept - "species", and all the rest are conceptions, or definitions, of that concept. I have christened this the Synapormorphic Concept of Species…
The Fordham Institute has released their annual evaluation of state science standards. They are very tough graders — Minnesota got a "C". Ack! Mom & Dad are going to be pissed, how will we ever get into a good college at this rate? The Institute does a fairly thorough breakdown, so there are…
This is by far the most popular of the four installments in this series because it contains the nifty puzzle exercise. Click on the spider-web-clock icon to see the comments on the original post. Just like last week, I have scheduled this post to appear at the time when I am actually teaching this…
This is a repost of a piece I wrote for The Panda's Thumb in April 2004. I add it here to put it in the Basics series. One of the more difficult conceptual problems the layperson has with biology lies in the simple word "primitive". It has many antonyms - "modern", "evolved" and "derived", and…

Useful info as usual! Thanks for the work you do, John.