Evolution

Texas messes with us this time- Our Future vs. Board of Education

The Texas Board of Education is voting this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, according to the Wall Street Journal. The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life ...

Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Mar 25 2009 - 8:33am

Evolution Is Still Alive And Well

30 Days of Evolution Blogging- The Finish Line Show Me The Science Month Day 30 Installment 30 ...

Article - Michael White - Mar 26 2009 - 9:55pm

Life’s Beginnings: Hypotheses And Plausibility

    One of the earliest scientific speculations about the origin of life was Alexander Oparin’s proposal in 1924 that life began as jelly-like blobs he called coacervates. Oparin knew that the unit of life was the cell, but it had not yet been established ...

Article - Dave Deamer - Mar 25 2009 - 8:34pm

W.D. Hamilton, Selfish Herds, And Other Biological Oddities

I recently saw W D Hamilton’s 1970 paper “Geometry for the Selfish Herd” described as “a classic in its own right.” As a long-time bibliophile this made it irresistible, but I was also intrigued by the incongruity of “selfish herd” and of linking geometry ...

Article - Steve Davis - Mar 30 2009 - 2:54am

Why Evolution Is True gets reviewed in PLoS

UC Berkeley Paleontologist Kevin Padian (also president of the National Center for Science Education) reviews Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True in PLoS Biology. While he praises the book for for its clarity and well-chosen examples, Padian argu ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Mar 31 2009 - 8:37pm

Murchison Meteorite- What A Fireball Over Australia Might Tell Us About The Origin Of Life

     In the summer of 1981, a colleague at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountainview, California, gave me a small black stone wrapped in aluminum foil that changed the course of my life. ...

Article - Dave Deamer - Apr 2 2009 - 2:16am

Carnival of Evolution is happening today

The Oyster's Garter ("Science served wet and salty"- and I'm sure you can take that to mean whatever you want) is hosting the latest, greatest edition of Carnival of Evolution. Read about genetic changes involved in the evolution of pre ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Apr 2 2009 - 2:02pm

Epigenetic What?

The other day I posted on my FaceBook profile that I better hurry up to finish my presentation on epigenetic inheritance. One of my friends commented: “I have no idea what that means, but good luck to you!” Ironically, that is, in part, the point of my pr ...

Article - Massimo Pigliucci - May 1 2009 - 6:12pm

Evolution Of Fins And Limbs Linked To Gills

The genetic toolkit that animals use to build fins and limbs is the same genetic toolkit that controls the development of part of the gill skeleton in sharks, according to research published in PNAS by Andrew Gillis and Neil Shubin of the University of Chi ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 5 2009 - 12:31am

A Tale Of Two Poisons: The Hunt For Detoxification Genes

As the U.S. Southwest grew warmer from 18,700 to 10,000 years ago, juniper trees vanished from what is now the Mojave Desert, robbing packrats of their favorite food. Now, University of Utah biologists have narrowed the hunt for detoxification genes that ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 6 2009 - 1:00am