Etch-a-Sketch science and rewriting evolutionary history.

I love this term introduced by Ed Yong in his post Do new discoveries ever “rewrite evolutionary history”?, which opens with:

You can’t go for a month without seeing a claim that some new discovery has rewritten evolutionary history. If headlines are to be believed, phylogeny – the business of drawing family trees between [...]


Arlin Stoltzfus and The Curious Disconnect.

In case you haven’t been following the series of posts by evolutionary biologist Dr. Arlin Stoltzfus posted on Sandwalk, here is a list hosted at his own site:

The Curious Disconnect: Introduction (March 19, 2010). The Mutationism Myth 1. The Monk’s Lost Code and the Great Confusion (March 29, 2010) describes how the mutationism [...]


Name this flower.

From Musselp:

I have my agents in Zambia looking to identify and acquire a specimen for me, but does anyone happen to know the name of this plant?


My talk on evolutionary imagery at the Centre For Inquiry.

Here is a video posted by the Centre For Inquiry Canada of a talk I gave in Toronto a few months ago. Larry Moran was my gracious host, and there were some good discussions over beer not captured on camera. :-)

The links mentioned in response to a question:

Evolver Zone

Understanding Evolution

[...]


Overselling segmentation.

This story appeared on Science Daily, based on a press release from CNRS in France:

Segmentation Is the Secret Behind the Extraordinary Diversification of Animals

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2010) — Segmentation, the repetition of identical anatomical units, seems to be the secret behind the diversity and longevity of the largest and most common animal [...]


Platypus and the problem with primitive.

The concept of “primitive” is one that is very often misunderstood. Properly defined, “primitive” means “more like a particular ancestor”, refers only to individual characteristics (not whole species or lineages), and is contrasted with “derived” (not “advanced” or “more evolved”). I have covered this and other misunderstandings of evolutionary concepts in various articles and [...]


Evolution of shell morphology in freshwater mussels.

For the past year, I have been working with several colleagues to completely redesign our first year biology program at the University of Guelph. One of the aspects of the new “Discovering Biodiversity” course (which complements courses in human health and molecular and cellular biology) that I am most excited about is the use [...]


EZ as an evolver blog network?

The recent kerfuffle at ScienceBlogs has got me thinking about whether Evolver Zone could/should expand to become something of a blog “network” for evolution bloggers who focus on science.  I think it could easily become a more informal collection of blogs — individuals could host their own blogs and have 100% control of design [...]


We're going to need a bigger boat, says Ahab.

Woah.  Check out this huge whale: Behold Leviathan: the sperm whale that killed other whales (Not Exactly Rocket Science).

I wonder who would win in a fight, Leviathan or Megalodon?

Epic whale-eating contest!


Evolution: Education and Outreach, vol. 3 issue 2.

The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is now available online. This is a special issue dedicated to Dr. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education on the occasion of her [redacted]th birthday!

A few of the papers are free online, but others require a subscription.  Some positive news announced in [...]