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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 [...] Brian Switek has a paper coming out in Evolution: Education and Outreach that discusses the nonsense surrounding Darwinius, dubbed hyper-hypefully “the link”, and the contribution that blogs played in setting the record straight. Check it out. If I were to put together a respectful, short, easy to follow resource of major evolutionary concepts that science writers could consult whenever they wrote a piece involving evolutionary aspects, would they use it? Would my friends in the science writer world promote it, refer colleagues to it, send authors who get things wrong [...] Two students and I currently have a paper in review on genome sizes in sponges, but whether it is accepted or needs major revisions, we will have to update the reference list. This is because the genome sequence of the sponge Amphimedon queenslandica was just published. This is very cool, and allows some interesting [...] As I linked to previously, Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science has started an interesting collection of personal career trajectories posted by science writers. It’s very interesting to see the different ways that writers have ended up in their chosen field. I have done interviews with a few of the people who have [...] My job as a scientist and professor is to conduct new research in my areas of expertise (genomics and evolution) and to teach science to university students about major concepts in biology. I also feel that it is very important to share my excitement and knowledge about science with a wider audience, which is [...] 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 [...] As I have explained in various blog posts and in this paper, it is a fallacy to assume that any one character found in a so-called “primitive” species alive today was also found in the ancestral species. All living species are modern species, and “primitive” vs. “derived” refers to characters, not whole species. Anyway, [...] Jonathan Eisen has pointed out some rather significant misinterpretation of evolutionary relationships in a recent New York Times article. Of course, misconceptions about evolutionary trees, the evolution of complex organs, the mechanism of natural selection, and even the nature of the terms “fact” and “theory” are rampant. I have tried to tackle these in [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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