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 readingthe PCR song
I found this on Pharyngula & thought I'd share it – it's a catchy little number & might reinforce a concept or two. (And a little frivolity never hurt anyone!)
Continue readingeven octopuses get christmas presents
Or should that be 'octopi'? Anyway, I just came across this story, about an octopus that was given a Mr Potatohead toy for Chrismas – and not only plays with it for extended periods, but gets aggressive if keepers try to remove it from his tank. (Thanks, PZ!) Awwww.
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 readinga bit off-topic, maybe?
… but after one of last year's weekend Schol sessions, someone asked me how you get to be a uni lecturer/researcher ie what would you have to do to get there. And we talked about it a bit. And now I'm searching round for a blog topic & thought, you're all probably heading for some sort […]
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.
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