Back to the dinosaur/caveman milk ad. (If you followed the link you may have found & watched a whole bunch of similar ads. All quite funny – I like the dino trying to wipe squashed caveman off its foot, in the one I linked to! – but all based on a (sadly) fairly common misconception […]
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fact & theory
A couple of science concepts that people often seem to have difficulty with are fact and theory: what the terms mean, and how we distinguish between them. One of my scientific heroes, the late Stephen Jay Gould, covered this very well in a 1981 essay. I've just been re-reading it & thought I'd post the […]
Continue readingthink carefully about what you read
A headline in a recent edition of the New Zealand Herald caught my eye: "Revealed: a dino's bugbear". The article kicks off: Biting insects might have killed off the dinosaurs, rather than a cataclysmic meteor impact, a new theory claims. Scientists now say disease spread by ancient mosquitoes, mites and ticks was probably the major […]
Continue readingI never thought I’d link to youtube, but…
… this is rather funny 🙂 But – what's wrong with it? Critique the science, not the ad's effectiveness!
Continue readingcreationist argument #2
Another argument says that evolution cannot possibly be tested, and what possible utilisation can there be? Well, OK, that's two for the price of one.
Continue readingancient whales and their cousins
Like many people, I've always been interested in whales. My interest in whale evolution began when I was teaching about mammal evolution at Massey, and it really got off the ground when I read Carl Zimmer's excellent book, At the water's edge. Now there's a fossil that tells us even more about whales and their […]
Continue readingevolution has shaped women’s spines! Really?
Last week the NZ Herald carried a story, based on a new scientific paper, about how evolution had affected the shape of women's spines, resulting in an adaptation for weight-bearing during pregnancy. The paper (Whitcome et al. 2007) describes how men & women differ in the shape of their lumbar vertebrae, and relates this to the weight gain […]
Continue readingindigobirds and evolution
I see the level 3 paper had a question on indigobird evolution. This is quite a neat example of rapid sympatric evolution in an animal (& one that I use in my own teaching here at Waikato), so I thought I might flesh it out a bit for you here.
Continue readinga worm, but not as we know it
One of the neat things that have come from advances in molecular biology is our ability to use DNA technology to tease out evolutionary relationships – especially those that aren't immediately obvious (such as the subject of an earlier post). Now here's another example – an animal that looks superficially like a worm – but turns out […]
Continue readinggradualism and/or punk eek?
I've just had an e-mail from Emma, who writes: I'm getting really confused about Punctuated Equilibrium and Gradualism… do both operate at once? Or do some scientists argue for one and some argue for the other?
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