Science News

Charles Darwin’s trip to the Galapagos Islands significantly influenced his thinking and paved the way for his theory of evolution. Since the 1970s, Princeton biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have been studying Darwin’s Finches and now claim that they’ve witnessed evolutionary change because of competition first hand. Read the rest

Last year, paleogeneticist Svante Paabo announced he was going to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. Now, Paabo estimates he'll have a draft completed within two years. Read the rest

Author: Michael Shermer
Publisher: Times Books
Year Published: 2006
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I've always liked Michael Shermer's witty, skeptical approach to virtually everything in his Scientific American columns. Regardless of whether I agree with his conclusions, he always offers me a new perspective on various, obscure topics. So it was with great interest that I picked up his new book, Why Darwin Matters. Read the rest

A team of scientists led by anthropologist Tim D White of the University of California, Berkeley recently found 31 fossils of Australopithecus anamensis, our 4.1 million year old ancestor, while digging in Ethiopia's Middle Awash valley. The fossils, which come from at least 8 individuals, are anatomically similar to an earlier hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, which lived 4.4 to 4.1 million years ago.

"There may have been times when one early hominid species evolved into another one without branching off into multiple species," White says. His view contrasts with that of researchers who suspect that hominids branched into many species over the past 6 million to 7 million years. Read the rest

In 1871, Darwin published his controversial Descent of Man which described how man and apes had evolved from a common ancestor and opened the floodgates on the debate for human evolution.

One of the biggest questions raised against the theory was how the human mind could have evolved from a more primitive animal brain. Humans make complex decisions, are driven by emotions, impose social and moral constructs, and participate in religious activities. Surely, there was a distinction between the human mind and the animal mind. In addition, since at least the Greeks, philosophers had been arguing for a mind/body dualism, meaning the two were fundamentally other and separate. Read the rest

One of the most extraordinary transitional fossils has been found - a 383 million year old ‘Fishapod.’ Transitional fossils are the remains of two different kinds of organisms mixed together. This one is called Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) and means ‘large shallow water fish.’

Fossils of the recently discovered creature are approximately 9ft long and were dub out of rock formations on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. It’s been dubbed ‘fishapod’ because it has the scales, teeth and gills of a fish but also a neck, bones in its pectoral fins that look like a primitive wrist and fingers, a big rib cage, which suggests the creature had lungs.

The discovery adds to the growing number of transitional fossils that evolution advocates cite as proof. In particular, it’s a great example of the fish-tetrapod transition.

For coverage, see Time, Nature, and the NY Times.

Source: Boing Boing