I have some good news and some bad news. (That reminds me of a something my father used to say: Dad: Jerry, I have some good news and some bad news. Which would you like to hear first? Jerry: The bad news. [I'm Jewish.] Dad: The bad news is that there isn’t any good news. […]
When my friend Andrew Berry, who teaches at Harvard, told me this story two days ago, I realized that it would be a great post for Wallace Year. (This is the centenary of the death of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, aka The Man Who Also Thought of Natural Selection.) I begged Andrew, an […]
I’m not sure how famous or authoritative Peter Hitchens is in the UK (he’s virtually unknown in the U.S.), but after I wrote a piece on his dissing of Anthony Grayling’s new book, several readers informed me that P. Hitchens, unlike his brother, is a serious doubter of modern evolutionary theory. I don’t want to […]
by Greg Mayer The first publication of natural selection as a general mechanism of evolutionary change was a joint paper by Darwin and Wallace read to the Linnean Society in 1858. It was not a coauthored paper, but rather the simultaneous publication under a single heading of separate works by the two authors. So why […]
I’m teaching introductory evolution this quarter, and am using as a textbook Doug Futuyma’s Evolution (second edition, Sinauer). Today’s lecture will be on the maintenance of genetic variation via natural selection (heterosis, etc.), and in the textbook under “frequency dependent selection,” I see this on page 319: Why is the sex ratio about even (1:1) […]
“Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.” —Charles Darwin, Notebooks From Eurekalert we have the description of a new species in a group I didn’t know existed (reference and link to open-access paper below): the forcepflies. Austromerope braziliensis is the newest species described in the family […]
Kelly Houle is this website’s Official Artist and Calligrapher™, and, as you know if you’re a regular, she’s producing an illuminated version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a project that will contain the entire book in Kelly’s marvelous calligraphy and splendid art. It will take her at least five years, and you’ll know […]
Darwin, unfortunately, was a dog person and seemed to dislike cats. I haven’t been able to find much information on Darwin and felids, and my inquiries to Janet Browne, the preeminent biographer of Darwin, have yielded bupkes. But loyal reader SGM has sent a drawing of a cat that appeared in Darwin’s works (perhaps the […]
by Greg Mayer There have been a number of interesting comments by readers on my post on the recent paper on the radiation of placental mammals by Maureen O’Leary and colleagues. I want to respond briefly to a few of them here. Biogeography. Does this paper imply that the origin and geographic distribution of the […]
I wrote this yesterday—Sunday afternoon, and decided to polish and post it today. ***** Today I fly back to Chicago to begin teaching evolution to undergraduates, and I’ll also begin writing the book that has immersed me so deeply in theology over the last year. This almost certainly means that I’ll have to reduce the […]
