Darwin and Evolution – Page 170

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The Origin of Specious Ideas: Did Darwin Explain Speciation?

April 29, 2005

Even though Darwin’s best seller was titled On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, Albert and Schluter in Current Biology1 claim his title was deceptive: “Darwin’s book is about adaptation and the origin of varieties and has surprisingly little to say about selection and ‘the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries’.” Is […]

Bible and Theology

Easter Essay

March 27, 2005

Accompanied by a picture of a cross and a sunset, captioned “The Sun and the Son,” a somber-looking Brian Walden wrote an essay in the BBC News expressing his reaction to Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees’ “chilling” comment that “It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; […]

Darwin and Evolution

Will Darwinian Law Protect the Unfit?

March 15, 2005

Eggheads at Vanderbilt import evolutionary ideas into legal policies that could negatively affect individual rights in devastating ways.

Origin of Life

Astrobiology: Follow the Money

January 7, 2005

To date, astrobiology remains, as George Gaylord Simpson once quipped, “an area of study without a known subject.” Yet it is one of the hottest research areas within NASA. A renowned origin-of-life researcher from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Dr. Jeffrey Bada, found out why when he read the new book The Living Universe: NASA and […]

Darwin and Evolution

Introducing the Stretch & Squish Theory of Evolution

December 14, 2004

How do you squish an arm into a wing, or stretch a fin into a leg? This sounds like the silly putty theory of evolution.

Origin of Life

Did Life Begin as “Failed Mineralogy” on the Seafloor?

December 3, 2004

A geologist with a lot of bluff and bluster makes the origin of life sound easy, but gets nailed by direct questions.

Origin of Life

Origin-of-Life Expert Jokes about Becoming a Creationist

November 5, 2004

Chemist admits problems in chemical evolution are so hard, he is tempted to become a creationist.

Darwin and Evolution

Darwin’s Finches: Researchers Tweak the Beak

September 3, 2004

Every once in awhile, a new angle on Darwin’s finches (an icon of evolution) appears in print. Peter and Rosemary Grant, who have devoted their life to studying everything possible about these related species of birds that inhabit the Galápagos Islands – only to find that evolutionary changes are reversible (see 04/26/2002 headline) – have […]

Darwin and Evolution

Homology for Dummies

May 5, 2004

Current Biology likes to give its readers primers on various concepts. The topic in the May 4 issue is homology.1 Caleb Webber and Chris P. Ponting explain this important evolutionary term for the rest of us. The Q&A format also introduces homology’s siblings: analogy, orthology, paralogy, xenology, and synteny. Some readers may not realize that […]

Darwin and Evolution

Origin-of-Life Researcher Leslie Orgel Interviewed

May 5, 2004

The May 4 issue of Current Biology1 contains an interview with organic chemist Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute, who in 1974 published the book The Origin of Life on Earth with Stanley Miller of spark-discharge fame (see 05/02/2003 and 10/31/2002 headlines). He considers his biggest mistake not thinking of the RNA World scenario first […]

Politics and Ethics

Eugenics Documentary Opens at Holocaust Museum

April 22, 2004

Michael Ollove at the Baltimore Sun reports on a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum entitled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The exhibit shows a 1937 Nazi propaganda film that invokes the law of natural selection as support for weeding out the unfit. Ollove writes, The narrator declares that “we humans have sinned […]

Darwin and Evolution

Can Evolution Create Homologous Structures by Different Paths?

April 22, 2004

Günter Thebien (Friedrich Schuller U, Jena, Germany) is baffled about how two plants arrived at similar structures by different evolutionary pathways. In the April 22 issue of Nature,1 he asks, Structures that occur in closely related organisms and that look the same are usually considered to be homologous – their similarity is taken to arise […]

Geology

Rethinking the Geological Layers

March 5, 2004

One of the most formative ideas in Darwin’s intellectual journey was the concept of gradualism, the principle of “small agencies and their cumulative effects.” This idea became a dominant motif in his philosophy of life. Describing how the assumption of gradualism permeated his last book (on earthworms) shortly before his death, Janet Browne, in her […]

Darwin and Evolution

Happy Darwin Day?

February 13, 2004

Humanists hope to have a new international holiday by 2009: Darwin Day. (Feb. 12 was Darwin’s birthday as well as Abe Lincoln’s, so it’s already set aside as a holiday in America, but promoters want this to be an international event.) According to Robert Evans’ story in Reuters, the British Humanist Association believes such a […]

Darwin and Evolution

Why Darwin Is Like Yoda, and Darwinism Like Marxism

February 4, 2004

Homage for the master is palpable in John Vandermeer’s review (Science, Jan. 23)1 of a thick new book entitled Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution by Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman (Princeton, 2004). Vandermeer seems almost worshipful in his opening lines: The nascent germ of many novel ideas in biology can be traced directly or […]

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