I spent this morning over at the School of Education, talking with trainee secondary teachers and their lecturer about the curriculum & achievement standards & teaching evolution. Over lunch a couple of the staff continued with this, talking particularly about the fact that, whether we like it or not, the issue of evolution is seen […]
Continue readingMonth: October 2008
big brains, c-sections, & evolution
A very quick one tonight (I’ve just got back from a Schol Bio session in Hawkes Bay & the brain’s not up to much!) – PZ Myers has an excellent post critiquing a paper that suggested that human evolution could be affected by the increasing incidence of caesarian deliveries. This is an idea that’s cropped up from time […]
Continue readingare humans evolving faster? a counter to steve jones
A little while back I put up a brief post about Steve Jones’ hypothesis that human evolution is slowing. At the time this proposal was on the receiving end of a fair bit of critical discussion on various science blogs. Now here’s an article by Benjamin Phelan, in Seed magazine, that suggests that the reverse is true […]
Continue readinglife in the cambrian
I first read Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Wonderful Life, not long after it was first published in 1989. The book centres on the Burgess Shale, a wonderfully rich source of of different fossils (a Lagerstätte) from the Cambrian, around 530 million years ago. The Burgess Shale is unusual in that it contains an array of soft-bodied […]
Continue readingmating systems in takahe
Takahe (Porphyrio hochstetteri) are one of the world’s most endangered birds. There are only around 120 still surviving in Fiordland, although a few more now live on predator-free islands off the New Zealand coast. (If you go to Tiritiri Matangi Island in the Hauraki Gulf you’ll be bound to see them.) But while the birds […]
Continue readingthe joys of essay-marking (no, seriously)
One of the benefits of reading (& marking) students’ essays is that you find a whole pile of new papers that are worth reading. (I expect them to go to the scientific literature for information & examples, and support for their ideas, & I will confess to getting just a leetle tetchy when they don’t….) […]
Continue readingviruses have s*x???
Well, yes, apparently they do – of a sort. ERV is a grad student studying retroviruses, and she’s just put up a great post on genetic recombination in HIV. You learn something new every day 🙂
Continue readinganswers to wells’ questions – all in one place
Cedric’s suggested that I should collate all my answers to Wells’ "10 questions to ask your biology teacher" all in one place. It hadn’t even occurred to me, so – thanks, Cedric, & here you are 🙂
Continue readingblog readability
I thought it was time to check my readability once more – looks like I could slip in a few polysyllabics now & again 🙂 blog readability test
Continue readinga pile of brown stuff
I was eating my muesli & idly flicking through the ‘lifestyle’ insert that comes with the morning paper when I happened on a page of ways to get oneself healthy for summer. Since at the moment my preparation for summer consists of walking the dog every morning & pedalling madly on the exercycle in the […]
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