In an BBC article describing a Royal Society paper on the rate of mutation in warm vs. cooler climates, the BBC made this statement:
DNA can mutate and change imperceptibly every time a cell divides and makes a copy of itself.
But when one of these mutations causes a change that is advantageous for the animal – for example, rendering it resistant to a particular disease – it is often “selected for”, or passed down to the next few generations of that same species.
Such changes, which create differences within a population but do not give rise to new species, are known as “microevolution”.
I suppose the BBC is into the Hopeful Monster theory or something.
Read it here, come back, and fight it out.
, which is quite a well known popular historical account of the last Czar of Russia and his family. Everyone knows the story of the end. The core of Czar’s family — the Czar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and his children — had been arrested and all of them were transported to a remote location in the Urals. A complex series of events had begun involving Czarist and Revolutionary forces. At one point, it occurred to the local revolutionary officials who were responsible for the incarceration of the Czar and his family that their execution would be a good idea, to avoid their recapture by Czarists forces in the area, and to break the loyalty of Czarist supporters still resisting the Revolution. So, on July 17th, 1918, the Czar and his family, their doctor and a nurse were escorted to an empty room in the compound in which they were being held and shot. The details are rather ghastly, as summarized by 
Continuing with our discussion of the 
Scott’s objective was to outline several areas of evolutionary biology where fundamental changes had occurred over recent years. This was to provide perspective and food for thought for the Life Sciences teachers attending the event, and Scott was very successful in this effort.In each case, Scott described a similar trope … “Not so many years ago, understanding [this or that thing] was thought nearly impossible…. but today, look what we have….”Specifically, Scott, a bird phylogeny expert, outlined four areas of research corresponding to four major areas of evolutionary biology: 
