That got your attention, didn’t it? It certainly got mine when I was scanning the Science alert news page a wee while ago. The parasite in question is Plasmodium, the single-celled organism that causes malaria. (I’ve written about Plasmodium before as it has a rather interesting evolutionary history.) And the research in question was published […]
Continue readingTag: scholarship biology
marathon man, part II (another replay)
Since I (re)posted the first part of this story last week, I figure I’d better complete the tale today 🙂 Hopefully things will settle down a bit at work now the semester’s under way, & I can get back into some ‘proper’ writing! Possession of an Achilles tendon is only one of the things that […]
Continue readingmarathon man (rpt)
I’ve been blogging since August 2007. Which seems quite a long time, looking back on it 🙂 Anyway, because I’m kind of rushed at the moment – & on the theory that new(ish) readers might not have delved all that far into the back issues, I thought I’d repost a couple of pieces from way […]
Continue readingvideos on creationism & evolution
A while back, I wrote about the way that the geology of the Grand Canyon has been misrepresented by ‘Young Earth’ creationists. Now here’s a good discussion of this from geologist Steve Newton: You may also remember the comments about evolution that were made by some of last year’s Miss USA contestants. A 2012 Darwin […]
Continue readingcritical thinking – a classroom resource
I joined Facebook about a year ago – primarily to access the NZIBO pages, but subsequently I found I quite enjoyed keeping up with what friends & family are up to. More recently I’ve added ‘entities’ like ScienceAlert, & through that particular link I’ve just found an excellent series of short videos on critical thinking. […]
Continue readingchris stringer talks about human origins
Just a heads-up for teachers & students: next month Chris Stringer will be giving public lectures on human evolution in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch & Dunedin. (No Hamilton talk! I am sad 🙁 I’ve got an all-day meeting that means I’d never get up to the Auckland event in time.) From the latest Royal Society "Alert": […]
Continue readingusing pseudoscience to teach science
The following post is an article that I originally wrote for the New Zealand Science Teacher journal (the official journal of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators), and is reproduced here by kind permission of the editor. We live in a time when science features large in our lives, probably more so than ever […]
Continue readingassessment for learning
A few days back, Grant asked if I would follow up on my promise to write something on assessment. It would be great to get a discussion going around how & why we assess students, so after a bit of thought I decided to kick things off with the following post, derived from my own […]
Continue readingthe origin of modern humans – free webinar
This comes at an opportune time for those of you teaching the Human Evolution content – and for those looking around for some follow-up reading 🙂 The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has a whole lot of free biology education resources available on line, and this upcoming webcast looks to be wonderful stuff: Bones, Stones, & Genes: the […]
Continue readinga mammoth resurrection task
I spent Saturday down in Hawkes Bay, running at Scholarship Biology preparation day at Lindsfarne College. (I would have spent Sunday happily idling through the lovely Art Deco parts of Napier, & visiting a few vinyards, but the weather forecast made me reconsider this option & I ended up driving back to Hamilton once the […]
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