Lamarckian evolution might be real. How’s that for mind-blowing? Lamarck hypothesized, basically, that traits developed by a parent are passed down to offspring. If a giraffe stretches its neck to reach leaves high on a tree, its children will have longer necks. That was long ago discarded as goofy and improbable, particularly since there’s no …
Tag Archives: evolution
Evolutionary forms.
Olivia Judson provides some delightful example of creatures caught in the act of evolving over the past few decades. The generation-to-generation natural selection of Galápagos finches is particularly fascinating—it shows evolution as a process that isn’t always slow, and anything but steady, but something very much alive.
On “On the Origin of Species.”
Biologists aren’t reading “On the Origin of Species”? That’s a shame—it’s a really interesting, really enjoyable book. Charles Darwin walks you right through his thinking, so that you can appreciate anew what now seems obvious. If evolution is a topic in which you’re at all interested, add this to your reading list. Or, if you …
Bacteria caught evolving a major new ability.
An evolutionary biologist has watched a colony of E. coli evolve a stunning new capability, right in the lab. He let a single bacterium reproduce for 44,000 generations in twelve populations. It was just one of the populations that, around the 31,500th generation, suddenly developed the ability to metabolize citrate, thus doubling its available food …
Continue reading “Bacteria caught evolving a major new ability.”
“Expelled”: No intelligence found.
Everybody agrees: Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution documentary is terrible. Surely these bad reviews are part of the grand conspiracy to stifle cdesign proponentsists.