I first found out about gastric-brooding frogs (Rheobatrachus silus) when reading Stephen Jay Gould’s essay "Here Goes Nothing" (as published in the 1991 book Bully for Brontosaurus). As he said, these frogs really do live up to their name: the frog swallows its fertilised eggs, broods tadpoles in its stomach, and gives birth to young frogs […]
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tool use – even more widespread than you thought
Yesterday my ‘Facebook science feed’ (ie daily browsing) brought me this stunning image (click the picture for the hyperlink). It’s from the book Thinkers of the Jungle: the Orangutan Report (Shuster, Smits & Ullal, 2008) & shows a young orangutan apparently using a long stick in lieu of a spear, copying local fishermen as they […]
Continue readinga little extrapolation is a dangerous thing
The other day one of my friends sent me a link to this discussion of a recently published paper. (‘Published’ in the sense that it’s available through archiv, which I gather means it hasn’t been through peer review.) The actual paper is available here. Basically, the authors claim that life has increased in complexity – […]
Continue readingare humans still evolving (a repeat visit)
What follows is a piece I wrote (quite a while ago now) for students planning on sitting Scholarship Biology. It was intended to start them thinking 🙂 I’ve just been asked to contribute to a panel discussion on RNZ around this subject, so thought it might be timely to re-post this article (I think time […]
Continue readingevolution – a good video for the classroom
Over lunch, I was catching up with my reading on various blogs and found – via PZ on Pharyngula – this little gem on evolution. The others on offer at the Stated Clearly site look good too; it would be nice to see the authors attract the crowd-sourcing they need to make more of the videos […]
Continue readinga cute little piggy (but why do we find it so?)
On Facebook yesterday, Science Alert posted a picture of a cute little piggy. Why, they asked, do humans feel such love for baby animals? Assuredly, this is a psychology experiment waiting to happen! Not so. For one of my favourite science writers beat them to it, by about 30 years. And in a rather entertaining manner. […]
Continue reading‘a newly discovered species of little people’
When the news first came out that Prof Mike Morwood & Thomas Sutikna were going to be giving a public lecture about Homo floresiensis, I was first excited & then seriously annoyed: yay! great topic, but rats! can’t get down to it. So I was absolutely delighted to see the following in this week’s Royal […]
Continue readingan interesting take on mousetrap evolution
One of the catchphrases of Intelligent Design creationism is ‘irreducible complexity’ – the idea that in some complex biological systems, it’s impossible to remove any one part without causing the whole system to fail. Supposedly this means that such systems could not have evolved but must be the product of a ‘designer’. The term – […]
Continue readingtraumatic insemination? ooh that sounds painful!
Bedbugs. One of the critters that I’d prefer not to encounter on my travels. They come out at night and bite sleeping humans (& other animals), retreating during the day to their dark hideaways, often in cracks in furniture, walls, or floors. This sounds very insanitary but the species that bites humans, Cimex lectularius, isn’t generally regarded […]
Continue readingscience: 1; society for textbook revise: 0
From Nature (& via a commenter at Silly Beliefs): science wins over creationism. In South Korea, the Society for Textbook Revise, STR [sic] – associated with the Korea Association for Creation Research – has apparently been pushing textbook publishers to remove two examples of evolution from school textbooks. You may be surprised to hear that […]
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