One of the questions in last year’s Level 3 Bio exam asked students to consider the impact of human predation on fish evolution. Most fish stocks, in New Zealand & around the world, are intensively harvested by fishermen. The mesh sizes used in their nets mean that the fish they catch are mostly the larger and […]
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does drinking coffee lower the risk of developing alzheimer’s disease?
"Gosh" said my husband, rustling the newspaper. "You’d better start drinking coffee!" He’d just come across a report saying that drinking more coffee in one’s middle years is associated with a decreased chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease, or other forms of dementia, in old age. But is this enough to make me want to give up my […]
Continue readingthat’s not what the textbooks say should happen!
Islands can be home to rare and unusual species, which have often evolved in isolation for extremely long periods of time. On many – particularly oceanic islands – there may be no native land mammals, except, perhaps for bats. So when mammalian predators do make it to these islands the effects can be devastating. (Incidentally, […]
Continue readingnatural selection and chemical replicators
Perhaps one of the biggest unanswered questions we have is "how did life begin?" Scientists have been working in the area of abiogenesis for some time now, beginning with the Miller-Urey work on the early-Earth atmosphere (which I’ve commented on previously). And there’s reasonable agreement that the precursors to life were probably some sort of […]
Continue readingsnowball earth
For anyone with a passing interest in global climates, present & past, the UK’s Birmingham University has put out an excellent article looking at the conditions that could have prevailed on a’snowball Earth’. The term ‘snowball Earth’ refers to a time (about 630 million years ago) when our planet was in the grip of a major ice […]
Continue readingcomplete neanderthal mtDNA sequenced
Grump grumpity grump – a headline like that & we don’t have full access to the journal (only up to a year ago)…. But anyway – on The Panda’s Thumb there’s a report of a research project which has achieved the full Neandertal mitochondrial DNA sequence. TPT quotes a conclusion from the summary of the paper: […]
Continue readingan early birthday surprise
Say ‘Charles Darwin’ and (after ‘evolution’!) many people would probably say ‘Galapagos’. The tortoises, mockingbirds, finches & iguanas that he observed and collected on the Galapagos Islands contributed to his development of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Darwin noted that there were two species of iguana on the islands – the […]
Continue readingfifteen evolutionary gems
Here’s a great set of short articles about evolution. Each one’s only a page long, and talks about a piece of research that (as the authors say) demonstrate the ‘breadth, depth, and power of evolutionary thinking’ (Gee, Howlett & Campbell, 2009). My current favourite is the one about the origins of the vertebrate skeleton, but […]
Continue readingevolution in action
When I did a plasma donation the other day, the blood-bank people put a note on my file so that the plasma would be fractionated & treated as necessary to prevent any recipients from getting malaria. (Not that I"ve got malaria!) This was because I’d just got back from Vanuatu, and malaria is relatively common […]
Continue readingan early dromaeosaur
I’ve always been interested in dinosaurs, & I loved Jurassic Park. Especially the raptors – they reminded me of birds in many ways. Which makes sense, of course, given that the majority consensus is that birds evolved from maniraptor dinosaurs 🙂 Anyway, all this means that dino headlines are always going to make me look twice. As I […]
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