In an earlier post I mentioned that natural selection (hunting pressure) had the potential to increase the proportion of tusklessness in African elephants. But I also noted that this was probably not the full story! And in fact it turns out to be quite a complex tale.
Continue readingTag: evolution
something else to share
James Burke was a wonderful science communicator (still may be; I don’t know if he’s still alive). Twenty-something years ago, I remember watching one of his TV series, The day the world changed. It impressed me then, & I wasn’t disappointed when I watched part of it again today, having found a link to it via […]
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 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 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 […]
Continue readinganother excellent blog to share
The Wild Side is by writer & evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson – it’s her blog in the New York Times. (She also wrote Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: the definitive guide to the evolutionary biology of sex.– a really good book full of great snippets of information about the weird and wonderful ways of […]
Continue readinghow not to design an experiment
On the Panda’s Thumb today I read a review of a very poor experimental set-up indeed. Apparently demonstrating that beneficial mutations (here, antibiotic resistance) lower the fitness of the organism possessing them, it actually does no such thing because of the multiple flaws in its design. But read the review – the reviewer (ERV) studies virology […]
Continue readingpossibilities for future research into evolution
A week or so back I posted comments by Massimo Pigliucci about future directions for evolution research. He was speaking in the context of an international workshop where these new ideas and directions were up for discussion. Well, that workshop’s over, material from it is available on-line (parts 1, 2, & 3), and the participants […]
Continue readinga very early tetrapod indeed
I’ve been fascinated by the story of early tetrapod evolution (where ‘tetrapod’ = an animal with 4 legs) for years, since reading Carl Zimmer’s wonderful book At the water’s edge (1998). Our understanding of when & where tetrapods evolved has been steadily extended by a series of fossil finds, most recently the ‘fishapod’ Tiktaalik. This was definitely […]
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