Soil Provides Library of Antibiotic Resistance
January 19, 2006
Genetic information that confers antibiotic resistance is already present in the environmental resistome.
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How to Overcome Student Objections to Evolution
December 21, 2005
Biology teachers face increasing difficulty from students coming into class with bad feelings about evolution (11/30/2005, 08/30/2005). Many pro-evolution teachers will be attracted to methods that have a demonstrable track record of relieving tensions and facilitating the process of getting students to accept Darwin’s theory. David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton U, NY) has just the thing. […]
Don’t PNA in our OOL
December 17, 2005
Theories for the origin of life (OOL) are in a crisis, unable to imagine how something as complex as a replicating cell could come into existence. Could PNA do it?
He’s Ba-a-a-ck: Lamarck Puts Pressure on Darwin – and ID, Too?
June 3, 2005
To historians of evolutionary theory, Lamarck is a 19th-century loser. His hypothesis of “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” according to high school textbooks and common knowledge, was debunked by experiment, and overturned when Darwin proposed natural selection as a mechanism for evolution. Why, then, does Massimo Pugliucci (Dept. of Ecology and Evolution, State University of New […]
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 […]
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; […]
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.
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 […]
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.
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 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’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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]