apparent beneficial effect of Bt-cotton crops

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 […]

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mtDNA & 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 & […]

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