One of my students sent me the link to this video (obviously thinking I could do with a bit of light relief from marking!): Futurama’s take on evolutionary arms races 🙂
Continue readingTag: genetics
why are some chickens white?
Apparently this is a question that has been known to keep some biologists awake at night. (Can’t say I’m one of them; my insomnia is caused by other, equally pressing issues LOL) Anyway, ERV has written a lovely post looking at this: apparently it’s all to do with metabolic pathways and endogenous retroviruses. Go over […]
Continue readingan ancient origin for the human eye
We understand a fair bit, these days, about the evolution of the complex, ‘camera-type’ vertebrate eye. Not that this has stopped creationsists (most recently the ‘intelligent design’ camp as represented by the Discovery Institute) from arguing that the eye is an excellent example of How Evolution Is Wrong – what, they ask, is the use […]
Continue readingthe human family tree gets even more complex
Once upon a time, a long time ago when I was a high school student, I remember being taught about human evolution as a fairly linear, straightforward narrative. OK, there were those ‘robust’ australopiths (aka Paranthropus) on a dead-end side branch, but otherwise species followed species – beginning around 14 million years ago with Ramapithecus (or Sivapithecus) – until you […]
Continue readinga mouse with no mother
I had a quick web-surf in between walking the dog (before it got too hot) & doing some paperwork. And behold! there was a post by PZ entitled My mouse has two daddies. So the paperwork had to wait a bit 🙂 PZ’s writing about a rather clever – & intricate!) – piece of work that’s resulted […]
Continue reading“killer neandertals” – does this one really stack up?
I spent yesterday up in Auckland, running a schol bio preparation day. (And thanks to Mike, Cindy, BEANZ & the Auckland Science Teachers Association) for setting it up.) I do enjoy these sessions (& hopefully the students do too!) as I like the interactions with students & they always ask nice, challenging questions. Anyway, after we’d finished the […]
Continue readingyes, we have some bananas
Prominent creationist Ray Comfort once (in)famously commented that the ‘design elements’ that make up a banana, including its so-convenient shape, are evidence for the existence of a Designer. A comment that has been pretty resoundingly debunked – unsurprisingly, since the banana-as-we-know-it is due in large part to the hand of man, selecting for those features […]
Continue readingsounds of biology
I rather like the way music & science seem to come together quite often these days 🙂 That thought bubbled to the top after I ran a pre-exam tutorial for my first-year bio students. After a couple of hours we’d all pretty much run out of oomph, so I thought that a bit of light […]
Continue readingthe great tree of life
This one’s for both teachers & students (& of course, anyone else interested in evolution and evolutionary trees): the Evolutionary Genealogy website 🙂 It’s a site that "seeks to promote the teaching and acceptance of the biological theory of evolution by emphasizing one of its great lessons: that life on Earth is one big extended […]
Continue readinga genetic window on marsupial evolution
I suspect that many people, asked where you’d find marsupials, would answer ‘Australia’ & leave it at that. But while we may be most familiar with Skippy & his ilk, those pouched mammals across the Tasman have close cousins half a world away – in South America.
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