Way back in 2004, the first of the ‘new’ Scholarship exams asked students to: Compare and contrast the ecological and evolutionary outcomes of releasing herbicide tolerant and insect resistant GM plants. It’s an interesting question. I suspect that a lot of the answers would have focused on the potential negative environmental effects of releasing these GM […]
Continue readingCategory: scholarship biology
how to argue against a scientific theory…
… and also, how not to. This is an excellent essay by the Sensuous Curmudgeon. I’ll list his key points here, but you really should go over and read the whole thing.
Continue readingcharles darwin – voyaging
A while back I sort of promised to post the talk I was going to give on Charles Darwin. Anyway, now I’ve done the talk (over in Tauranga; may well be repeating it in Hamilton in the fairly near future), & so here are the words. (Sort of. I tend to develop my presentations in […]
Continue readingpreparing for scholarship
A little while back I ran a Schol Bio preparation day for Waikato/BoP students (plus some from further afield). Everyone seemed to find the day useful. At the end I asked students to fill out an evaluation form for me, so that I could find out what worked well for them & where I need […]
Continue readingwhy you should study evolution
I’ve just been talking with some of my students about evolution: fact, theory, process of, the whole lot. And why it’s important that people learn about it. I wish I had seen this piece by Olivia Judson beforehand – I could have referred them to it there & then. And because she says it so […]
Continue readingmtDNA & neandertal/sapiens relationships
When I was at high school, mumblety-mumble years ago, the accepted wisdom was that modern humans and Neandertals were sub-species in the same genus: Homo sapiens sapiens and H. sapiens neandertalensis. That changed, to the view that they were probably separate species, with analyses of new fossil finds. More recently, molecular biology techniques have enabled researchers to compare sapiens & […]
Continue reading‘the genius of Charles Darwin’
PZ has just posted the video The Genius of Charles Darwin on Pharyngula. It’s fronted by Richard Dawkins, & his intention in making this film (part of a series, by the sound of it) is to look at who Darwin was, how he developed the theory of evolution, what that theory is – & why it […]
Continue readingenvironmental change and evolution
I was talking with a senior Bio teacher a few days back & she said it would be good if I could deconstruct some of the questions in 90717 (patterns of evolution), as this was an area where her students seemed to have difficulty. I’m not exactly going to do that here. But one of the […]
Continue readinga general piece on Scholarship
I’ve been asked to give a general talk to a group of visiting students about Scholarship exams – eek! Anyway, what follows is what they’ll be getting (my biology schol presentation without any biology…) The basic details come from the Scholarship section on the NZQA website.
Continue readingpopulation genetics of A1 & A2 milk
This is an item I originally wrote for the Science on the Farm website. But because I briefly mentioned the A1/A2 milk thing in the last post, I thought I could usefully bring this across to the Bioblog as well. The 2006 Scholarship Biology paper included a question on the genetics of A1 and A2 […]
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