Around 14 months ago the husband & I were spending a lazy holiday in Rarotonga. We did quite a bit of snorkelling on the reefs, and especially enjoyed our experiences at Muri, where we saw a good range of reef fish in near-ideal conditions (as in, clear, calm, relatively shallow water). There were several moray […]
Continue readingYear: 2013
kiwi evolution – a new take on an icon’s ancient past
'The' kiwi (Apteryx spp.) has always been a bit of an enigma, not least for the fact that it lays an absolutely enormous egg in comparison to its body size. In one of the essays in his book Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), Stephen Jay Gould argued that this differential in egg/body size was due to the […]
Continue readingsecrets from an ancient graveyard
One of my current favourite TV programs is Time Team – I enjoy learning little bits of history & Tony Robinson's happy enthusiasm is so contagious (but I still think of him as Baldrick). So you'll understand that I was happily distracted this morning when, while looking for something else (isn't that usually the way?), […]
Continue readingselecting for maladaptive behaviour
One of the questions that often comes up in my first-year bio classes relates to natural selection and human evolution. Does the fact that modern medical science keeps alive people who in previous centuries might have died, mean that we're countering the effects of natural selection? As you can imagine, this generates quite a lot […]
Continue readingshaking up the academy? or, how the academy could shake up teaching
This is something I originally wrote for my 'other' blog over at Talking Teaching. Last week I spent a couple of days down in Wellington, attending the annual symposium for the Ako Aotearoa Academy. The Academy's made up of the winners of the national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards, so there are around 150 or so […]
Continue readingnz’s pisa rankings slip, & the soul-searching begins
The latest PISA results are out, and NZ – despite remaining in the 'above the average' group for OECD countries – has nonetheless slipped in this measure of achievement in reading, maths administered by the Programme for International Student Assessment . This is of concern, & there are probably multiple complex causes for our decline. […]
Continue readingthe daily mail comes late to the pig-ape hybridisation idea
In posting an item about the 'pig-ape hybridisation' suggestion for human origins, the Daily Mail is a) coming rather late to the story (a slow day in the newsroom, perhaps?) and b) showing more regard for sensationalism than for good investigative journalism. The story's one I've posted about before (& I've reposted my original piece […]
Continue readingthe fascinating psychology behind conspiracy theories
I've just read (via the NZ Skeptics page on FB) a fascinating article on Slate about the psychology of conspiracy theorists. In it, Will Saletan describes a series of studies from the past 20 years, that attempted to understand why a fair proportion of people seem to incline towards conspiracy theories (for example, a 2007 poll […]
Continue readingwhy did the pigeon cross the road?
if I lived in Hawkes Bay I'd be keen to attend this Royal Society public lecture, & I'll certainly be watching the video, which will be available after. It looks like being of interest & value to senior Biology teachers. The ninth lecture in the 10X10 series Why did the pigeon cross the road? […]
Continue readinga glorious (but deadly) cephalopod
Every now & then the husband goes on a fossil-fossicking expedition, in order to add to his collection of things long dead & turned to stone. There are a number of good sites in the Waikato region, and one of them has yielded quite a few belemnite remains: specifically, the bullet-shaped fossilised internal shells of […]
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