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 [...]
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 [...]
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. :-)
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]