St. Bernard Dog
I woke up this morning to see headlines such as the following in my newsreader:
Study Casts Doubt on Creationism … and St. Bernard Study Casts Doubt on Creationism….
It turns out that the shape of the dog’s head has evolved over time, and that this can only be explained […]

My chief (science-related) gripe these days is the lack of linkage between evolutionary thinking and a lot of biology … in education as well as in practice. Therefore, I very much enjoyed this essay (in PLoS) by Edward Holmes, linking evolutionary dynamics to viral genome diversity, and in turn, linking this to important outcomes […]

I’m guessing here. I think it has been created over the last few months but the announcement is delayed for obvious reasons … nobody wants the equivilant of “Cold Fusion” tacked to your resume. Especially if you are Craig Venter, who is already a bit controversial.
According to reports, Venter is prepared to announce […]

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Signaling … the intentional sending of a message, with meaning, from one individual to another … mediates a lot of inter-organism interaction between and among all sorts of plants and animals.
The role of signaling1 may be central to survival or reproduction for a particular organism, so the signaling behavior and attendant […]

… that slides out of a place deep in the eel’s throat and grabs the fish’s prey, like in that movie, “Alien” …
Have a look at the following video. Watch behind the morsel of food for a thingie coming out of the moray eels’ throat:

Did you see it? Here it is again from a […]

Douglas Erwin, of the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian) has an essay in the New York Times on the idea that Evolutionary Biology is poised on the edge of a paradigm shift.
In the past few years every element of [The Darwinian Paradigm] has been attacked. Concerns about the sources of evolutionary innovation […]

Remember this post: Mammals and the KT Event?
It was one of my better posts, and was read by thousands, even though it elicited only one posted comment (it did start a few email discussions from some colleagues who I think might be blogospheriphobic).
Anyway, there is a new study regarding fossil evidence for […]

… or more specifically, a Pathophysiology. It isn’t natural or healthy.
Or so says Bush’s current nominee for Surgeon General. Nice one, George.
Actually, this is a very interesting case, because the problem surrounds the production of a talk/paper by the nominee, James Holsinger, back in 1991 in conjunction with a Methodist Church […]

There is a new report in Nature pertaining to the evolution of limbs.
Simply put, the genetic material … in the form of HOX genes … that underlies the development of limbs in tetrapods (amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals) was identified in fish, and the expressio of this genetic materail in the paddlefish …
Regular […]

Why does a soldier throw himself on a hand grenade to save the lives of a half-dozen unrelated fellow soldiers? Why does someone run into a burning building they happen to be passing to save a child they don’t know? From a Darwinian perspective these seem to be enigmatic behaviors that would “select […]

Afarensis takes creationist Dave Scot to task in this post that summarizes the counterargument to claims such as “there are not enough hominid fossils to fill a single coffin.”
When reading this discussion, keep in mind that it all depends on how you count the bones. For instance, Afarensis notes that there are over 400 […]

Gilboa is in the news!
You probably never heard of Gilboa. If you have, then we’re probably cousins, or at least, know each other’s cousins. Gilboa is a place very close to my heart. As a youth, my family often camped in the area. When I was older, I did […]

The kind of bite … the modus operandus … used by terrestrial vertebrate feeders may have evolved among aquatic organisms, according to a new paper in PNAS. From the abstract:
There is no consensus on when in the fish-tetrapod transition suction feeding, the primary method of prey capture in the aquatic realm, evolved […]

My student, Marta, exploded the other day.
She was sitting there in class two weeks ago and exploded. She does not know that I know this, but I noticed it happen. Since she was sitting, as usual, in the front row, and it was all in her face, the other students did […]