The human appendix is often held up as an example of a vestigial organ – something that is much reduced in form from the homologous structure in other organisms (though not necessarily also non-functional). Darwin wrote a little bit about our appendix in The descent of man. Now it seems that a research team has done […]
Continue readingTag: history of science
nature is neither kind nor unkind
– it’s the result of an intricate web of evolutionary relationships. Why’d I pick this topic? Because I came across Chet Raymo’s musings on Sacculina, a barnacle that over time has become an internal parasite on crabs. Female Sacculina larvae settle on a crab’s exoskeleton & injects a mass of cells that move to the crab’s abdomen, […]
Continue readinginteresting readings on human evolution
Those of you who came to the WEB days a few weeks ago (WEB = Waikato Experience of Biology, for those who didn’t) might remember me saying that the human family tree is quite a complex thing. Not only is it a branching tree, rather than the linear model of early palaeoanthropologists, but our understanding of […]
Continue readinga couple of interesting articles for you to read
Both from the pen keyboard of Brian Switek, on his blog Laelaps. The first begins with a quote from Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, recounting the genocidal approach of an Argentinian general towards some of the local indigenous tribes. Darwin found this approach horrifying, but also doubted that there was much that could be done […]
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