Darwin at the museum

Well, I've finally made it up to Auckland, to go to the 'Darwin' exhibition at Auckland War Memorial Museum. And it's as good as I'd hoped.  If you live in Auckland, or you're visiting, do try to go & see it. It's a wonderful walk through Darwin's life and through his development of the theory of evolution.

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Coming up to the exams

On Saturday I was over in Taranaki, doing some revision work with a group of Schol Bio students. After we’d finished I had a look through their feedback forms. While most felt they’d got something from the session, a few said that they felt ‘more concerned’ about the exam than they had before the session. This in […]

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“Punk eek” and speciation

The concept of punctuated evolution – bursts of evolutionary novelty separated by long periods of stasis – was first proposed by Stephen Jay Gould & Niles Eldredge in 1972. Since then, there's been an ongoing debate among evolutionary biologists about how significant ‘punk eek' could be in the evolution of new species. (Remember that they aren't […]

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