Imagine—you've just been born, and your future looks bleak. After an all-too brief infancy when you'll be cared for and fed, you'll be forced into child labour, cleaning a dark and crowded home and caring for your many siblings. You'll be subsequently put on guard duty to defend your home against vicious intruders. If you [...]
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, has filed four lawsuits in a Californian court alleging that Mr Timonen, who ran its online operation in America, stole $375,000 (£239,000) over three years. It is claiming $950,000 in damages, while Mr Dawkins is suing him for $14,000 owed to him personally. Mr Timonen strongly denies [...]
Human evolutionary change has been rapid and extensive; so much so that the genetic similarity and recent divergence between the human and the chimp lineages came as a profound surprise. Three million years ago humans were relatively minor elements of a rich East African mammalian fauna. Since then, our lineage has expanded geographically, demographically and [...]
In March 1860 the New York Times reviewed The Origin of Species:
Meanwhile, Mr. DARWIN, as the fruit of a quarter of a century of patient observation and experiment, throws out, in a book whose title at least has by this time become familiar to the reading public, a series of arguments and [...]
Evolution Going Great, Reports Trilobite:
"Things are looking mighty fine," announced the prehistoric invertebrate, taking measure of his surroundings through a series of small, hexagonal eyelets located at the tip of his thorax. "Sulfurous gas seems to be bubbling up to the surface pretty good, and several single-cell organisms appear to be mutating [...]
Predicting the direction of ornament evolution in Trinidadian guppies Poecilia reticulata:
Sexual selection is thought to be opposed by natural selection such that ornamental traits express a balance between these two antagonistic influences. Phenotypic variation among populations may indicate local shifts in this balance, or that different stable ‘solutions’ are possible, but testing these [...]
Rasmus Nielsen in today’s issue of Evolution discusses what’s happened to the concept of adaptationism in the 30 years since Gould and Lewontin published one of the most infamous critiques in evolutionary biology:
In 1979, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin (Gould and Lewontin 1979), published their highly influential paper on adaptionism [...]
Using Phylogenetics to trace morphological evolution.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fObmcBGMm9I]
