The new semester kicks off tomorrow & right now I'm adding resources to my first-year bio moodle page & running through the powerpoints for the week's lectures. After a couple of introductory sessions we're diving into the section of the class that focuses on plants, and I'm giving some serious thought to how I present […]
Continue readingCategory: evolution
selecting 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 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 […]
Continue readinga creeping assassin
The daughter & her friends play Assassin's Creed from time to time. This little arachnid would fit right in: Photo: Jeremy Miller For this is an assassin spider, one of a number of species (in the superfamily Palpiamanoidea) that prey on other spiders. The assassin spiders have a long history: a combination of fossil & DNA evidence suggests […]
Continue readingteach creationism, undermine science
Every now & then I've had someone say to me that there's no harm in children hearing about 'other ways of knowing' about the world during their time at school, so why am I worried about creationism being delivered in the classroom? Well, first up, my concerns – & those of most of my colleagues […]
Continue readingcharter schools can teach creationism after all
I first wrote about charter schools just over a year ago. At the time I was commenting on statements that such schools would be able to employ as teachers people who lacked teaching qualifications, wondering how that could sit with the Minister's statements around achieving quality teaching practice. But I also noted concerns that charter […]
Continue readingbicep-flexing & s*xual selection
When I was a kid, we’d all look forward to Friday evenings – because Dad & Grandma would come back from town with the weekly supply of comics. The ads in the back were almost as good as the cartoons, although we were very disappointed to find out that sea monkeys were definitely not as […]
Continue readinghave you heard of a pyrosome?
"Have you heard of a pyrosome?" asks Carin Bondar. My immediate answer was, no; no, I haven’t – but you know me, I’m always curious 🙂 Turns out that pyrosomes – which look almost other-worldly in the video below – are colonial tunicates: the same taxonomic group as the perhaps-more-familiar sea squirts. And that means […]
Continue readinga great synopsis of evolution? no, i don’t think so
The great & wonderful FB (</snark>) this morning delivered me a link to this video, describing it as ‘a great depiction of the process of evolution’. To which, having watched it, I can only say, ‘no, I don’t think so’. Why? Well, apart from the music (repetitive rap-style tracks don’t do a lot for me, […]
Continue readingaquatic apes & custard elephants
The ‘aquatic ape’ hypothesis (it can’t be described as a theory) has been around for quite a while, & in fact I’ve blogged about it before. So I was sorry to hear that Sir David Attenborough, who’s done so much to promote conservation issues and enhance our understanding of the natural world, appeared to have […]
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