English is likely to go the way of Persian, Sanskrit and Latin and, over many hundreds of years, inevitably die out
Marc Hauser who is famous for his work into animal cognition, as well as a number of popular science books (e.g. Wild Minds), has been investigated for scientific misconduct:
The findings have resulted in the retraction of an influential study that he led. “MH accepts responsibility for the error,’’ says the retraction of the study on [...]
The Bone Wars occurred during a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two [...]
Eva Jablonka asks if there is more to heredity, natural selection, and evolution than genes and DNA?:
Growing evidence indicates there is more to heredity than DNA, that heritable non-DNA variations can take place during development, sometimes in response to an organism’s environment. The notion of soft inheritance is returning to reputable scientific [...]
Lincoln Stein updates his 2003 prediction that bioinformatics would be dead in ten years:
In February 2003 I gave a keynote address for the second annual O’Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference called ‘Bioinformatics: Gone in 2012′ in which I predicted that bioinformatics as a discipline separate from mainstream biology would be gone in ten years. My [...]
Speakers at the International Union of Biological Sciences, Symposium on Genetics of Population Structure in Pavia, Italy, in 1953. How many big-name geneticists can you name (Haldane, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Mayr, Waddington, E.B. Ford)?
In today’s Nature, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that migration is an engine of social change because the movement of people into societies that offer a better way of life is a more powerful driver of cultural evolution than conflict and conquest (pay-access only, sorry!):
As cultural evolutionists interested in how societies [...]
Today, anthropology is at war with itself. The discipline has divided into two schools of thought – the social anthropologists and the evolutionary anthropologists. The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines [...]
The University of Oxford has announced that Professor Marcus du Sautoy will be replacing Richard Dawkins in the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science (story).
This is great news – I saw him give a talk last year and he was fantastic. The Guardian has an old (2003!) profile piece on [...]
