“I was the most popular man in Oxford for full four & twenty hours.” — T.H. Huxley, following his debate with Bishop Wilberforce At 25, Thomas Henry Huxley returned from a four-year stint in the Royal Navy — he was assistant surgeon on a Royal Navy corvette exploring the South Seas from 1846 to 1850 […]
evolution
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To Run is Human
“In the ancient Olympics, nobody competed with shoes, you would run barefoot.” — Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist Forget the invention of sex, fire, toolmaking, language, agriculture. The real turning point in the four-billion-year saga from the origin of life on Earth to bacon-flavored dental floss occurred 7 million years ago, a blink of a geological eye. That’s […]
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Evolution’s Co-Discoverer
July 1 should be the day on which we celebrate the theory of evolution. That’s when, in 1858, this revolutionary idea was presented to the world — at least to the august Linnean Society of London — in the form of writings by Charles Darwin and a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace. We don’t because, […]
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Every Breath You Take
Other than The Anatomy Coloring Book (you have to be a certain age), I can’t say I’ve paid much attention to my internal organs. Most of the time they all worked fine, so why worry? This lackadaisical attitude came to an abrupt end a few weeks ago when I suffered a collapsed lung — see […]
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Blame Evolution
Many conspiracy theorists, who seem to make up about half the posters I’m seeing on Facebook these days, have glommed onto the idea that SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus causing the COVID-19 epidemic) was engineered in a lab. Where? Wuhan, China. Why? To cull China’s aging population and to sow chaos around the world. You’ll be relieved […]
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Evolution Isn’t Progress!
Last week, I discussed the fallacy of thinking of evolution as a progressive process, that is, simple to complex, “lower” to “higher” animals, culminating, of course, in humans. The theory, “orthogenesis,” (from the Greek “straight origin”) is the opposite of randomness. Orthogenesis presumes that the variation from one generation to the next is directed toward […]
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Evolution Isn’t Progress!
Evolution is not progress: There’s no goal, no purpose, no plan, no direction. Easy to say, hard to believe. We humans are the last to see the randomness of evolution because we think we’re special. As the late anthropologist Ruth Benedict said, “Fish are the last to see the water.” True, humans have qualities possessed […]
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HumBug: A Moth of Another Color
When I think the word “moth” I think of something gray. To be sure there are brightly colored day fliers, but the nocturnal majority are gray or brown, patterned to blend in with tree bark where they rest during the day. One of the things that makes moth identification challenging is that there are often […]