Too cool, part 49: Genetics and Human Evolution

Professor Ceiling Cat Emeritus (sometimes known as Dr. Jerry Coyne) over at Why Evolution Is True brought this one up, and normally I’d just send you over there for this, but it relates directly to a few posts that I’ve done in the past, so I went ahead an embedded it here.

Dr. Matthew Cobb read more

So many questions

I had started this a little while ago and was hashing out the drafts when I realized Darwin’s birthday was coming up, and felt delaying it until now was appropriate. That said, I apologize in advance, because this post is simply begging for a lot more research on my part, but instead of engaging in that and coming back with something more informative, I’m plowing ahead in ignorance (like read more

You can call me Al

Over at the New York Times, Carl Zimmer has an article on the difficulties of pinning down hominid species, which illustrates an interesting perspective in biology, but is unfortunately a little too brief. There are a couple of factors at play, and no easy way to resolve them.

The very first thing to bear in mind is that ‘species’ is an arbitrary distinction in many ways. The word was read more