Welcome to the 17th edition of the Carnival of Evolution. This month, we celebrate not only great evolution blogging around the web, but also some of the best evolution writing of all time. 150 years ago, in November of 1859, The Origin of Species was published. For our sesquicentennial celebration of this major turning point in the history of biology, I've taken a virtual voyage on the Beagle through the vast expanse of the blogosphere. And like Darwin on that first trip in the Beagle, I've kept a journal of my observations, with a little posthumous help from Charles.

The day is here! After much reading and reviewing, we’ve determined the finalists in our University Writing Competition. We had some pretty impressive entries, and we believe our final group highlights the best examples of science writing we received. The finalists ended up being a good cross-section of subjects, science disciplines, and participating universities. All are all well written, informative - and often times, entertaining. We think you’ll agree.

A Sunday morning browsing through preprints recently posted in the Cornell Arxiv revealed interesting reading material. If you have a couple of hours to kill next week, why not having a look at the following papers ? It will definitely hurt you less than spending the time on your WII or watching Jerry Springer.

SB: Richard Leakey, your son, was scheduled to speak at Yale in 2003 on "Wildlife Wars." The announcement mentioned that he and his team, The Hominid Gang, had found more than 200 fossils since Richard took part in his first expedition in 1967. I must apologize for my first name basis here. There are several Leakey names that I would like to bring up.

Leakey: You are a darling! First, my interview occurs on Halloween. Second, you start with Richard, my pride and joy. He is a good boy. He found the "Turkana Boy" in 1984 near Kenya's Lake Turkana -- a complete skeleton. One of the rare finds, you know.

In this article I am going to suggest that this arbitrary separation is meaningless.  Much like physics had to come to terms with wave-particle duality, biology must consider the same perspective where the answer depends very much on the question and how it is asked.

A few days ago, I was working at home when the phone rang. I answered, and was surprised to hear a soft, accented voice asking for me. It was Lada Tsokolova, calling from Germany, with the sad news that her husband Sergey had just died of cancer.  I was stunned. Sergey was young! He had spent nearly a year in my lab in 2005-06, on a Fulbright Fellowship, and I had seen him recently at scientific meetings in Kyoto and Heidelberg, but he never mentioned that he was ill.

How to explain modern belief?    A rising number of people report having no formal religious affiliation but the number of Americans who say they pray has increased, according to a new survey from the University of Chicago.

'Spiritual but not religious' as a growing category seems to mean very little, since it seeks to straddle two different worlds, but the results are telling;  in addition to an increased number of people who pray, a growing number believe in the afterlife. When asked how they view God, the most common responses were the traditional images of father and judge.

So it seems to be formal religion that is on the wane, not an increase in secular or atheist sentiment.