A recent letter-writer in our local paper presented this argument: Many people believe the evolutionary theory but none practice it. For example, how much is left to chance in the design and assembly of a 747 jet? Nothing is left to chance. Every component is tested to breaking point to find any weakness in design […]
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something to listen to
I’m away at a conference at the moment, & maybe in a day or two I’ll find time to write about some of the things I’ve heard. One of the speakers had some things to say that I think are very relevant to students. But for now – following on from that article in the Dominion […]
Continue readinganother title for the reading list
Thank a friend for this – she commented that she liked my reading list 🙂 Anyway, I’ve just started reading David Mindell’s book The Evolving World: evolution in everyday life. Still in the intro, actually, but it’s shaping up to be another worthwhile addition to my shelves.
Continue readingmore from your inner fish
I’ve just finished reading Your inner fish (Shubin, 2008) – honestly, I can’t recommend it highly enough. But for anyone who hasn’t bought the book yet, let’s look at what another part of our anatomy – our ears – has to tell us about our evolutionary past.
Continue readinga smelly story
At the moment I’m reading Neil Shubin’s book Your inner fish. It’s a wonderful walk through the evolution of life, taking various aspects of our own biology & tracing their evolutionary history. Over lunch I was reading the chapter on the sense of smell, & some of the ideas there really excited me & I […]
Continue readinga pregnant placoderm
And what’s a placoderm, you ask? It’s an ancient armoured fish. The placoderms were a group of fish that were common during the Devonian (410 – 360 million years ago), but then became extinct. The reason for the title of this post? A group of Australian researchers (Long et al., 2008) have just reported on a placoderm fossil that contained embryos […]
Continue readingthe tasmanian tiger’s evolutionary affinities
The (sadly extinct) Tasmanian Tiger and living wolves provide an excellent example of convergent evolution. They have the same ecological niche, with the Tiger filling the role of a top predator in Australia, while wolves are found throughout the northern hemisphere. But the Tiger is a marsupial, while wolves are placental mammals.
Continue readingdarwin’s tomatoes & the evolution of novel features
I was talking about evolution with some students the other day and one of them said, 'But to get new features in an organism you have to have new genes, and mutation can't do that." We talked a bit about transposons and other means of gene duplication, & I also pointed out that changes in […]
Continue readingone very big frog
This is an item that's been in my 'how cool is that?' folder for a while – a very large dinosaur-eating frog!
Continue readingthe thylacine – back from the dead?
Not quite (although that's implied in some of the rather breathless reporting of an extraordinary paper that was published on-line this month). Nevertheless, the real story describes a striking achievement: the cloning of DNA from the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.
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