In my recent article on Understanding natural selection in E:EO, I reviewed a large number of studies that examined conceptions of evolution among students from the high school to undergraduate level…

Tomorrow's Science will be a special issue reporting tons of new information on the fossil hominid Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi"), which is really exciting (though not as much as Darwinius, which was…

Researchers writing in Science have described Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.   The last common ancestor shared by humans and…

Sometimes it is helpful to have a catchy word to describe one's type of research. I think that's why "omics" words are so popular -- they encapsulate a complex combination of approaches (usually…

This article was pretty interesting.  Apparently the gene that is responsible for psychosis is also responsible for creativity too.  I don't know if I can fit this into a larger national…

A commenter on a previous post seems to have objected to the claim that evolutionary science makes predictions. gimme 5 examples of predictions, i mean real predictions: not fit the model hogwash…

Today I gave my lecture on mammal diversity and evolution in the 4th year vertebrate course. We have been talking a fair bit about paraphyletic groups, common vs. scientific names, and so on. Within…

Just came across this nice video by C0nc0rdance summarizing the work of Susumu Ohno and the original concept of junk DNA. (Oh, and it gets bonus points for using one of my figures!)

An article in LiveScience entitled "Evolution Can't Go Backward" has highlighted an experiment done to determine whether a protein could be "unmutated" (i.e. returned to its original state) and…

Acoelomorpha, a collection of worms which comprises roughly 350 species, is part of a much larger group called bilateral animals, which are organisms that have symmetrical body forms and include…