The Texas Board of Education is voting this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, according to the Wall Street Journal. The proposed curriculum…

Weeds, trees or tomatoes; no matter the plant genome of interest, Yves Van de Peer and associate Bioinformaticians at the VIB-Ugent research institute repeatedly observe that the last…

There is a conversation about evolution that I’m apparently doomed to replay over and over with various family members, friends and acquaintances. I tell a friend that the evidence for evolution is…

Humans belong to a sub-clasification of animals called deuterostomes (or second-mouth). During embryological development there is a period where part of the tissue “folds” back into itself creating…

How did life begin, anyway?      I am a research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and over the past 30 years my students and I have been working to understand how…

Professor Lynn Margulis is the biologist who had the incredible insight that the cells of modern organisms were originally formed by the symbiotic combination of prokaryotic cells and colonies of…

Show Me The Science Month Day 25 Installment 25 In nature, there is a sucker born every day. We humans may think that we're clever, but evolution has produced con games that would put Bernie Madoff…

Show Me The Science Month Day 24 Installment 24 How do new genes arise? One common way is through gene duplication - the creation of a second copy of a gene when the DNA replication or repair…

Want to start an argument among shark paleontologists?   Ask whether Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark, evolved from the line that produced Carcharodon megalodon, the largest…

Show Me The Science Month Day 23 Installment 23 Thanks to your parents, you have two copies of each chromosome, which means that you have maternal and paternal copies of every gene. In most cases,…