This morning, a Bohemian Waxwing was reported from the Arts Quad in a flock of Cedar Waxwings that feed on the crabapples around campus. I was sitting in Macroevolution with three other student birders when one got the email on his cell phone. The next hour and twenty-five minutes of lecture on speciation were pure […]

The first, Classic Papers on Human Origins from Nature Magazine contains one or two introductory sentences on each of ten articles spanning the years from 1925 to 1994. The authors include Louis Leakey, Richard Leakey, Johanson, and Dart.
The second and more relevant entry is Symmetry Breaking and the Evolution of Development by A Richard Palmer.
For […]

One of the nation’s leading proponents of intelligent design* told a Kansas University audience Thursday that Darwinism or evolution can explain how, in the absence of predators, a bird might lose its ability to fly and begin to walk on the ground.
But it can’t explain how complex living systems are built - the designs are […]

Thanks to Robert Crowther for his enlightening article entitled: The Role of Evolution in Biomedical Research is Highly Exaggerated
To complement Crowther’s very interesting article (important to read Crowther’s article first in order to understand this one), excerpts from the next and most recent article, destroys even further all of that Hsueh’s Darwinian bluff:
Pan W, Tu […]

The bayblab is proud to host the first ever blog carnival on cancer research. The purpose of the exercise was two-fold: Find out who blogs about cancer research, and share ideas on this topic. Hopefully this will be the first step in creating a community of cancer research bloggers and readers. So please visit the […]

A new report (see below) from the U.S. House of Representatives has condemned officials at the Smithsonian Institution for imposing a religious test on scientists who work there. And it suggests their attacks on a scientist who just edited an article on intelligent design are just the tip of the iceberg of an industry-wide fear […]

New satellite imaging research may help save the dwindling lemur population in the African nation of Madagascar.
Using satellite imagery, GIS and ecological and demographic data from the field, Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & […]

On tuesday Waddington’s “The Evolution of adaptations” (link goes to the paper itself) appeared on the Main Blog and since then 3 commentaries have been added to the Personal Posts category:
Re: The evolution of adaptations (Waddington) (1)
The reigning modern view is that, in nature, the direction of mutational change is entirely at random, and that […]

Reporting findings that help shape our understanding of how tool use has evolved among primates, researchers have discovered evidence that chimpanzees, at least under some conditions, are capable of habitually fashioning and using tools to hunt mammalian prey. The work [1], reported by Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University and Paco Bertolani of the University […]

Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology (Gerd B. Müller (Muller) and Stuart Newman)Chapter 1:
Origination of Organismal Form: The Forgotten Cause In Evolutionary Theory
Evolutionary biology arose from the age-old desire to understand the origin and the diver-sification of organismal forms. During the past 150 years, the question of how these […]