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Every few years, an international test is given and American students finish in the middle of the pack.  They went up during the 2000s but American kids have never been at the top - international students learn facts and American kids learn 'how to t ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 5 2012 - 11:00pm - 0 attachments

... was the complex result of multiple, interacting factors. "Speciation (the process of evolving new species from existing ones) is driven ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 5 2012 - 4:30am - 0 attachments

The comments thread for an article that I wrote a couple of weeks ago has suddenly been swamped by the replies of a young-earth creationist. Perhaps I should have expected it, with an article about hoaxed fossils. He presents an orgy of anecdotes that ...

Article - Oliver Knevitt - Feb 3 2011 - 6:57am - 0 attachments

No one draws pictures of heads with little gears or hydraulics inside any more. The modern conceptualization of the brain is firmly computational. The brain may be wet, squooshy, and easy to serve with an ice cream scooper, but it is nevertheless a comput ...

Article - Mark Changizi - Nov 16 2009 - 4:38pm - 0 attachments

It is no exaggeration to call evolution “the central concept of biology.” So why is the fact of evolution denied by half of our population? A new article in PLoS Biology by Michael Berkman , Julianna Pacheco, and Eric Plutzer suggest ...

Article - John Dennehy - Jul 13 2008 - 11:28am - 0 attachments

Microbiologist Carl Woese is well known as an iconoclast. Indeed, few biologists have so thoroughly shaken the tree of life as he did when he proposed that there are not two major branches -- prokaryotes , whose cells lack nuclei, and eukaryote ...

Article - T. Ryan Gregory - Feb 24 2008 - 12:23pm - 0 attachments

... observed in the Canadian arctic. After their initial speciation, polar bears and brown bears came into contact again and the ...

Article - News Staff - May 17 2012 - 10:49am - 0 attachments

... serve as an early pairing mechanism in meiosis, and aid in speciation." Yunis and Yasmineh (1971) focused primarily on structural roles for non-coding DNA, and I don't think aiding in speciation can be considered a "function", but they did also include the basic ...

Article - T. Ryan Gregory - Dec 19 2009 - 11:17am - 0 attachments

ANARCHY AND EVOLUTION Competition of life forms (bio-human, android, nanobots, robot) is critical for them to evolve into robust species capable of dealing with all the diversity in the universe. Early earth life had millions of years for this comp ...

Blog Post - Alan Hoshor - Mar 9 2012 - 1:44pm - 0 attachments

I think one of the first things that got me interested in evolutionary biology was finding out that whales used to have legs. It's pretty incredible that the sleek, powerful whales of modern day oceans had their origins in blundering land animals like cow ...

Article - Oliver Knevitt - Mar 25 2011 - 4:44pm - 0 attachments