Evolution

Mutualism's Rule- So Says Olivia Judson At The Wild Side

Nice blog today on mutualisms by Olivia Judson who writes the Wild Side blog/column for the New York Times (I seem to be writing a lot about writers for the NY Times these days... not sure what is going on with that). ...

Article - Jonathan Eisen - Apr 9 2008 - 11:08am

Another Tree Of Life Mystery- Insects, Ion Channels And Smell

In research published in Nature, researchers at Rockefeller University and the University of Tokyo state that insects have adopted a strategy to detect odors that is radically different from those of other organisms-- an unexpected and controversial findin ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 13 2008 - 3:21pm

The Ancient Origins Of The Placenta- An Eggshell?

"The placenta is this amazing, complex structure and it's unique to mammals, but we've had no idea what its evolutionary origins are," says Julie Baker, PhD, assistant professor of genetics at Stanford Univeristy and senior author of a ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 14 2008 - 1:26pm

Human Slaughter or Natural Competition?

A fierce debate is in progress. Human slaughter or natural demise.... Giant beavers, oversized ground sloths, and huge armadillo-like creatures all disappeared within a couple of thousand years — a mere heartbeat in geological terms. Was it just hard livi ...

Blog Post - Heidi Henderson - Apr 13 2009 - 3:00pm

Chess, Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Psychology And The Nature Of Pseudoscience

I’m reading a delightful history of chess,  The Immortal Game, by David Shenk, and got to the chapter dealing with the dark side of chess: the fact that a small but significant number of top players throughout history have gone off the deep end-- includin ...

Article - Massimo Pigliucci - May 19 2011 - 3:47pm

Gerobatrachus Hottoni- The Missing Link Between Salamander And Frog

The description of an ancient amphibian that millions of years ago swam in quiet pools and caught mayflies on the surrounding land in Texas has set to rest one of the greatest current controversies in vertebrate evolution. The discovery was made by a resea ...

Article - News Staff - May 24 2008 - 4:02pm

Rock Eating Bacteria Bring New Questions About The Evolution Of Life On Earth

Once considered a barren plain dotted with hydrothermal vents, the seafloor's rocky regions appear to be teeming with microbial life, say scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Mass., University of Southern Cali ...

Article - News Staff - May 29 2008 - 12:10am

Junk DNA And The Onion Test

One copy of the human genome is more than 3 billion nucleotides in length, and weighs in at about 3.5 picograms (pg, or trillionths of a gram). Only about 1.5% of this is composed of our 20,000 or so protein-coding genes, though other data suggest that at ...

Article - T. Ryan Gregory - Jun 1 2008 - 7:25am

The Platypus, Evolution, And Why Piattelli-Palmarini Is Wrong

In May, Nature magazine published a draft sequence of the entire genome of the platypus, the bizarre mammal endemic of Australia that is so strange looking that the first scientists who received a description of it from Captain John Hunter in 1798 thought ...

Article - Massimo Pigliucci - Jun 1 2008 - 9:58am

Conversation With A Modern Creationist: Part 2

I've written this post to address some of the issues raised in the comments to my first post on the evolution versus creationism debate.   (1) A major reason that Biblical creationism thrives in certain parts of America is because-- unlike every othe ...

Article - Lee Silver - Jun 5 2008 - 3:11pm