Turns out, Lamarck wasn't far wrong. Fascinating stuff!

You can't read the whole article unless you're a subscriber, but you can get it at the newsstand, or read my copy.

slacktivist once again has good insights. In this post, he describes the impoverished Biblical-literalist view of the origin of the universe, and the way its adherents generally set up atheistic nihilism as the only alternative view. Predictably, this leads to a fair number of people raised as Biblical literalists becoming atheistic nihilists when they ( Read more... )

meowse supplied this link: Transitional fish/tetrapod fossils found in Nunavut (the Canadian Arctic territory) and given Inuit name.

Archbishop Williams calls teaching creationism as science "a category mistake". Newspaper coverage gets it all wrong, to no one's surprise.

eggsafety very kindly sent me a link to this video in which Will Wright presents the in-development Maxis game Spore. The video is over half an hour long, but highly worth the time. I've never seen a more ambitious or compelling game concept in my life, and I desperately want it ( Read more... )

meowse posted a lot of links, including several very interesting articles on evolution, brains, and nutrition. Topics I found interesting: Cane toad adaptation, side-by-side speciation, brain changes in response to being bullied, hardwired response to sweet flavors, relation of taste to nutrients in foods.

Hundreds of US churches observed Darwin's birthday by honoring the scientific understanding of evolution and its compatibility with Christian faith. Thanks for the pointer, eggsafety!

a very happy 197th birthday to Charles Darwin, and thanks to elfs for pointing it out.

Humans are clearly not intelligently designed. Does another species fit the bill?

link to research on current evolution in human beings. Yes, we are still experiencing natural selection (or at least, some kind of selection!), and that on a great number of our genes.