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This struck me as a very odd passage. It’s from a recent, critical review by Richard Dawkins of E.O. Wilson’s latest book. “Nobody doubts that some groups survive better than others. What is controversial is the idea that differential group survival drives evolution, as differential individual survival does. The American grey squirrel is driving [...] Busy, but need to vent a little about these stories. 1. New evolutionary research disproves living missing link theories Evolution is not a steady march towards ever more sophisticated beings and therefore the search for the living “missing links” is pointless, according to findings published by a team of researchers led by Dr. Hervé [...] I enjoyed Jerry Coyne’s book Why Evolution is True (though I don’t care for the title — Why Evolution is a Scientific Fact would have been much more accurate). The one complaint I had was that Coyne is a serious Darwinian (up to an including calling evolution “Darwinism”). That is, he interprets pretty much [...] 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 [...] 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? 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 [...] 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 [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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