It has been a common tactic among creationists to attempt to discredit scientific ideas by linking them to the horrific actions of the likes of Hitler and the Nazis. The scientific merits of a theory do not rest on its societal implications, of course, but there is also the issue that the Nazis did [...]
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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 [...] Evolution: Education and Outreach Volume 3, Number 4 / December 2010 489-490 Editorial Niles Eldredge and Greg Eldredge 491-494 How Systematics Became “Phylogenetic” Niles Eldredge 495-498 Introduction to the Special Issue Sagas of the Children of Time: The Importance of Phylogenetic Teaching in Biology Daniel R. Brooks 499-505 Why Trees Are [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] From the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology comes a press release describing a paper in Nature about bacterial evolution… Bacteria Expect the Unexpected Organisms ensure the survival of their species by genetically adapting to the environment. If environmental conditions change too rapidly, the extinction of a species may be the consequence. A strategy [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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