Evolution

The Formidable Persuasion promotes upside down evolutionary trees by their lack of adherence to traditional Hennigian methodology for phylogenetic reconstruction. This is a conscientious deviation promulgated by affirmative action appointments of minorit ...

Blog Post - Henry Loconte - Mar 18 2009 - 6:57pm

Peppered moth

The peppered moth, Biston betularia, has been used as a classic example of natural selection in action. This moth (like many others) includes both light and dark forms that change in frequency under conditions of higher or lower pollution. Anti-evolutionis ...

Blog Post - T. Ryan Gregory - Dec 29 2008 - 9:14am

Bicycle without a wheel.

I won't get into this in detail, in part because I wrote about it in my paper The evolution of complex organs in the special issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach about eyes. ...

Blog Post - T. Ryan Gregory - Dec 31 2008 - 5:40pm

Evolutionary gems (Nature)

Nature recently provided a list of " 15 evolutionary gems "....the document summarizes 15 lines of evidence from papers published in Nature over the past 10 years. The evidence is drawn from the fossil record, from studies of natural and artific ...

Blog Post - T. Ryan Gregory - Dec 31 2008 - 7:07pm

Rethinking The Theoretical Foundation Of Evolution

Ian Ramjohn recently posted an interesting (but far too short) article on Scientific Blogging titled Competition and Coexistence in which he discussed various theoretical scenarios that could develop if a new species formed and began competing with its pa ...

Article - Steve Davis - Jan 6 2009 - 2:13pm

Tuberculosis Diversity and Genetic Drift

Bacteria often provide vivid examples of how powerful the forces of evolution can be. In keeping with that, Hershberg, et al., in a paper published in PLoS, show that evolutionary forces may increase the number of drug-resistent strains of Mycobacterium ...

Blog Post - Nicholas Horton - Jan 5 2009 - 9:07am

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Altruism: Gene-culture Coevolution and the Internalization of Norms (A Review)

In an article for the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Herbert Gintis provides a model that shows that: “if an internal norm is fitness enhancing, then for plausible patterns of socialization, the allele for ...

Blog Post - Nicholas Horton - Jan 5 2009 - 12:24pm

Two Huge Evolutionary Leaps- How Life Went From Bacteria To The Blue Whale

There are fossils of all shapes and sizes but we like dinosaurs because they're big and that means they could engage in terrific imaginary battles with other big things, like King Kong. You don't see natural history museums vying for fossil skele ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 6 2009 - 1:45pm

Intelligent Design Advocates Confused By Their Own Arguments

If you read almost any science blog other than mine, you're probably aware of Brown University biologist Ken Miller's smackdown of Intelligent Design (ID) shill Casey Luskin, posted on Carl Zimmer's Loom: part 1, part 2, and part 3. At issue ...

Article - Michael White - Jan 7 2009 - 11:18am

Population Genetics Blogging in German

I just ran across a great population genetics blog, Selective Sweep, written by derele, a PhD student in Edinburgh. He writes in both German and English about genomics, population genetics, and Science 2.0. Recently he's started a interesting primer o ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Jan 7 2009 - 12:05pm