Evolution

A Duke University study suggests that evolution can behave as differently as dogs and cats. While the dogs depend on an energy-efficient style of four-footed running over long distances to catch…

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.…

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…

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),…

My displeasure with media stories continues today with another over-the-top, speculative, and tailor-made-for-quote-mining article from Discovery News. The gist of it is that some people saw a very…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…