Evolution

A frustrating press release (or, adaptation is not random)

My feeling about science news reports is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, I read most of the main news services in order to keep up with research outside of my own discipline. On the other hand, I would say that about once every two or three days I find a ...

Blog Post - T. Ryan Gregory - Nov 12 2008 - 10:07am

Brewer's Yeast Has A Social Life And It Can Teach Us A Lot About Evolution

As any good beer brewer knows, the yeast used in fermentation stick together in large clumps consisting of thousands of cells that settle out where they are easily removed. Brewers had even traced this behavior to a gene that encodes a sticky protein that ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 13 2008 - 1:50pm

Blogs and teaching.

There are many beneficial aspects to reading and writing blogs about science. I have found that they are often much better than news feeds (which generally are uncritical repetitions of press releases) for learning about research in areas other than my own ...

Blog Post - T. Ryan Gregory - Nov 14 2008 - 9:21am

Homo Erectus And Brain Size- The Hole Story

A recently discovered female pelvis is changing minds about the head size of an ancient human ancestor, Homo erectus, and consequently revising notions about how smart they may have been. The Pleistocene adult female Homo erectus pelvis was from the Busidi ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 14 2008 - 3:37pm

Is There Such A Thing As Human Nature?

A couple of years ago I co-taught a course in philosophy and science with a colleague in the Philosophy department at Stony Brook University. At some point the issue of “human nature” came up, and my colleague looked at me with a mix of surprise and pity: ...

Article - Massimo Pigliucci - Nov 24 2008 - 10:49am

Evolution In Detail: The Grants' Study Of Darwin's Finches

Yesterday our department hosted Peter and Rosemary Grant, who spoke about their 30+ years studying natural selection and finches in the Galapagos. (If you're interested in the book version of their work, check out Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer Priz ...

Article - Michael White - Nov 21 2008 - 1:52pm

This week's paradigm shift: a single-celled organism can also leave tracks

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Blog Post - T. Ryan Gregory - Nov 25 2008 - 1:57pm

On Race

I’ve recently touched on the delicate topic of  human nature. Now it's the turn of the even more inflammatory subject of race. The occasion is provided by a short commentary in Science (1), reporting on a meeting of the National Human Genome Research ...

Article - Massimo Pigliucci - Nov 25 2008 - 5:56pm

Odontochelys Semitestacea- 220 Million Year Old Triassic Turtle Tells Us How It Got Its Shell

With hard bony shells to shelter and protect them, turtles are unique and have long posed a mystery to scientists who wonder how such an elegant body structure came to be.  Since the age of dinosaurs, turtles have looked pretty much as they do now with the ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 26 2008 - 6:33pm

The Vatican And Evolution: The Usual Crap

The news coming out of the recent, and much trumpeted, Vatican-sponsored conference on evolution isn’t that good, according to a brief article that appeared in Science magazine on November 14. Molecular biologist John Abelson commented on the most controv ...

Article - Massimo Pigliucci - Dec 1 2008 - 8:44pm