19th Nov 2008 : Scientists have found a wide-eyed primate -- a clawed fur ball that fits snugly in one hand -- in the first live sighting in more than 80 years of a creature that some thought was extinct.

18th Nov 2008 : Richard Dawkins considers another of the extraordinary creatures that helped inspire Darwin's theory of evolution.

17th Nov 2008 : The 460,000-year-old skull of a woolly rhino, reconstructed from 53 fragments, is the oldest example of these mighty, ice age beasts ever found in Europe.

12th Nov 2008 : Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood.

12th Nov 2008 : A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.

11th Nov 2008 : Just how smart are monkeys? Their innate curiosity leads them to try new things, but it’s their culture — the passing of information from one generation to the next — that teaches them much of what they know.

11th Nov 2008 : Octopus origins, shark migrations and giant bacteria to be unveiled

7th Nov 2008 : Two mockingbirds, which are said to have helped Charles Darwin develop his theory on evolution, are to go on public display for the first time.

26th Oct 2008 : The secret of worm grunting, a mysterious technique used by fishermen to tempt worms to the surface, has been unearthed.

22nd Oct 2008 : For our ancestors, misjudging the physical strength of a would-be opponent might have resulted in painful –– and potentially deadly –– defeat.

20th Oct 2008 : Everything you think you know about the soul is wrong.

17th Oct 2008 : One of the most famous experiments of all time has just been found to have been even more successful than anyone realised. The Miller-Urey spark flask experiment could hold the key to the origin of life on Earth.

13th Oct 2008 : The new book is simple to summarize: just read the title. It's aimed at a lay audience and answers the question of why biologists are so darned confident about the theory of evolution by going through a strong subset of the evidence.

24th Sept 2008 : CHONGZUO, China — Long ago, in the poverty-stricken hills of southern China, a village banished its children to the forest to feed on wild fruits and leaves. Years later, when food stores improved, the children's parents returned to the woods to reclaim their young.

21st Jul 2008 : Why do we crave love so much, even to the point that we would die for it? To learn more about our very real, very physical need for romantic love, Helen Fisher and her research team took MRIs of people in love -- and people who had just been dumped.

13th Jul 2008 : Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes -- concepts that are literally alive.

7th Jul 2008 : In 2006, I was one of tens of thousands of academic scientists all around the world who received, unsolicited and completely free, a huge and lavishly illustrated book called Atlas of Creation by the Turkish Muslim apologist Harun Yahya. The thesis of the book, which was published in eleven languages, is that evolution is false. The main 'evidence' consists of page after page of beautiful photographs of fossil animals, each one accompanied by a modern counterpart that is said to have changed not at all since the time of the fossil. It is a large-format book, a thick coffee-table book with more than 700 high-gloss colour pages. The cost of production of such a book must have been extremely high, and one is bound to wonder where the money came from to produce it and then distribute it gratis in so many copies and so many languages.

1st Jul 2008 : It was on 1 July 1858, 150 years ago today, that the idea of natural selection was first presented to the public in a joint reading of Darwin's and Wallace's papers at the Linnean Society of London (an event which they did not recognize as important at the time), which makes today analogous to the Fourth of July for the biology revolution. Celebrate! If you've got a some fireworks you were saving for the holiday in a few days time, set off a few early.

25th Jun 2008 : Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.

18th Jun 2008 : In a week or so, the trumpets will sound, heralding the start of 18 months of non-stop festivities in honor of Charles Darwin. July 1, 2008, is the 150th anniversary of the first announcement of his discovery of natural selection, the main driving force of evolution.

14th Jun 2008 : Behe's Empty Box

Some years ago, John Catalano, of New York, was a kind of predecessor of Josh who ran a website which was a kind of predecessor of this one. One of the many good things John did was to maintain a section called "Behe's Empty Box". You might be surprised that it is necessary to pay attention to Behe. Unfortunately, it is. I frequently get letters from people who have read Darwin's Black Box and seem persuaded by it,

12th Jun 2008 : This is an older article, but well worth the read.

10th Jun 2008 : Excellent new book by Gary Marcus.

31th May 2008 : To mark a double anniversary celebrating Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, his supporters are taking the fight to their opponents

29th May 2008 : The contentious debate about why insects evolved to put the interests of the colony over the individual has been reignited by new research from the University of Leeds, showing that they do so to increase the chances that their genes will be passed on.

23rd May 2008 : Many people see the years of the Tinbergen group at Oxford as a golden age of Ethology, beginning when Niko arrived from the Netherlands in 1950, and culminating in his Nobel Prize of 1973.

16th May 2008 : Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he's come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.

15th May 2008 : UC Berkeley is going to court this week over their Understanding Evolution web site (that's an excellent resource, by the way, especially if you're just trying to get up to speed on the science). At issue is the fact that the site dares to point out that some religions contradict the evidence, and other religions try to avoid conflict with science; that is interpreted to be a sectarian endorsement of certain religions over others. This is where separation of church and state becomes insane: when you are not allowed to point out obvious idiocies because they are protected religious beliefs. Here's the offending section: I think it's pretty namby-pamby and bends over backwards to give deference to superstitious nonsense, but some people are apparently irate over a simple, accurate truth statement: "some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science". They do, but a university isn't allowed to say so?

11th May 2008 : Richard Dawkins pointed out that nature is Darwinian and dominated by the short-term greediness that is required within competitive ecosystems to pass on one's genes. Humans are no different and are dominated by those instincts, but with our complex brain-power we have the ability to rise above these destructive tendencies and be a good steward to the planet and ourselves.

6th May 2008 : Eyes are one of evolution's most useful and prevalent inventions, equipping approximately 95 percent of living species. They exist in many different forms across nature, having evolved convergently across different species. Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells. In the pre-Cambrian era, insects, in particular the dragonfly, would take the compound eye to new heights. Find out how dinosaurs adapted their eyes to become such successful hunters of prey. And while dinosaurs remained at the top of the food chain for 150 million years, tiny early mammals developed night vision to populate the night as a survival technique. Finally, learn how primates underwent several adaptations to their eyes to better exploit their new habitat, and how the ability to see colors helped them find food.

5th May 2008 : Switches within DNA that govern when and where genes are turned on enable genomes to generate the great diversity of animal forms from very similar sets of genes

5th May 2008 : If there is life on Mars, it might soon be coaxed out of hiding by a new instrument designed to detect the subtle chemical traces of biological activity.

5th May 2008 : PARIS (AFP) - A new, simplified family tree of humanity has dealt a blow to those who contend that the enigmatic hominids known as Neanderthals intermingled with our forebears.

3rd May 2008 : 16 Apr 08: Neanderthal expert Dr Chris Stringer discusses new ideas of how neanderthals and early man co-existed with Telegraph Science Editor Dr Roger Highfield.

25th Apr 2008 : Harvard Scientists Say T-Rex Was A Close Cousin Of Barnyard Fowl

17th Apr 2008 :

17th Apr 2008 : If you think you understand it, you don't know nearly enough about it

11th Apr 2008 : A fossil animal locked in Lebanese limestone has been shown to be an extremely precious discovery - a snake with two legs.

10th Apr 2008 : WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A rare and primitive frog living in a remote Borneo stream has no lungs and apparently absorbs oxygen through its skin, researchers reported on Wednesday.

10th Apr 2008 : I have to make this really, really simple for the "Hitler was an evolutionist" dimwits.

2nd Apr 2008 : In the first experiment of its kind conducted in nature, a University of British Columbia evolutionary biologist has come up with strong evidence for one of Charles Darwin's cornerstone ideas – adaptation to the environment accelerates the creation of new species.

2nd Apr 2008 : Professor Sean Carroll was on the BBC Radio 4 "Today Programme" this morning, talking about the subject of his new book The Making of the Fittest, and he mentions that the argument against creationism/intelligent design is now stronger than ever.

6th Mar 2008 : I have been taken aback by the inexplicable hostility of Mary Midgley's assault.1 Some colleagues have advised me that such transparent spite is best ignored, but others warn that the venomous tone of her article may conceal the errors in its content. Indeed, we are in danger of assuming that nobody would dare to be so rude without taking the elementary precaution of being right in what she said. We may even bend over backwards to concede some of her points, simply in order to appear fair-minded when we deplore the way she made them. I deplore bad manners as strongly as anyone, but more importantly I shall show that Midgley has no good point to make. She seems not to understand biology or the way biologists use language. No doubt my ignorance would be just as obvious if I rushed headlong into her field of expertise, but I would then adopt a more diffident tone. As it is we are both in my corner, and it is hard for me not to regard the gloves as off. I will try to make my reply constructive, in the hope that it may interest those who have not read Midgley's article, as well as those who have. Unattributed quotations with page numbers will all be taken from her article. Since it was my book, The SelJish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), which stimulated her attack, it will also be necessary for me to quote from it. I shall divide my reply into eight sections.

6th Mar 2008 : SOLOMONS, MARYLAND—On a clear January day, Stephen Godfrey is dressed for fossilhunting: frayed baggy jeans, a puffy green vest, and a leather jacket that's seen better times. A paleontologist and curator at the modest Calvert Marine Museum here, Godfrey frequents the nearby Calvert Cliffs, which rise from the shoreline of Chesapeake Bay and hold everything from ancient shark teeth to dolphin skulls. "You start collecting them because, well, they're beautiful," he says of his beloved fossils.

2nd Mar 2008 : A major evolution exhibit opens in Toronto next week, which begs the question: Why so much fuss over a 150-year-old theory that seems to gather more scientific support by the decade?

28th Feb 2008 : A fossilised "sea monster" unearthed on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science, Norwegian scientists have announced.

27th Feb 2008 : Being the second part of an occasional series looking at mutations.

26th Feb 2008 :

26th Feb 2008 : Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you'd have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.

24th Feb 2008 : This isn't "Part 2" in our 3-part tales videos, but this is a youtube video created by RodHullIAmHim for an actual section in The Ancestor's Tale, called "The Salamander's Tale". The audio is from the audiobook version, read by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward.

21st Feb 2008 : Here's a nice illustration of the evidence behind our understanding of the evolution of whales, all in 7 minutes.

21st Feb 2008 : WOODS HOLE, Mass. — The cuttlefish in Roger Hanlon's laboratory were in fine form. Their skin was taking on new colors and patterns faster than the digital signs in Times Square.

21st Feb 2008 : ONE of evolution's missing links has been found lurking in Sydney Harbour.

18th Feb 2008 : A 70-million-year-old fossil of a giant frog has been unearthed in Madagascar by a team of UK and US scientists.

18th Feb 2008 : ROM researcher helps uncover the earliest fossil yet of a prehistoric bat

15th Feb 2008 : From the 60 Second Science Podcast.

7th Feb 2008 :

4th Feb 2008 : Far from having stopped, the pace of 'advantageous mutation' is moving much faster than we thought, a new study discovers

1st Feb 2008 : P.Z. Myers, biologist at the University of Minnesota Morris, host of the website Pharyngula( http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ ), and indefatigable defender of evolution, shares his expertise and insights on brain function, explaining how research into the brain reveals the evolutionary causes of religious belief.

1st Feb 2008 : Dr. Geoffrey Simmons, Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute and Dr. PZ Myers, Biologist and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris will debate Darwin's theory of evolution.

24th Jan 2008 : Scientists believe they could be a step closer to solving the mystery of how the first birds took to the air.

19th Jan 2008 : A scientist has achieved a world first... by cloning himself. In a breakthrough certain to provoke an ethical furore, Samuel Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman's egg.

19th Jan 2008 : ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2008) — According to Darwin's theory of evolution, individuals in a species pass successful traits onto their offspring through a process called "deterministic inheritance." Over multiple generations, advantageous developmental trends – such as the lengthening of the giraffe's neck – occur.

18th Jan 2008 : Reconciling the biblical God with Darwin's theories would challenge even an omnipotent being. But a growing number of thinkers and scientists are altering their concept of the deity to make room for evolution.

17th Jan 2008 : Stephen's guest is Neil Shubin author of Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.

17th Jan 2008 : The fossilised skull of the largest rodent ever recorded has been described by scientists for the first time.

15th Jan 2008 : The Institute of Medicine of The National Academy of Sciences, USA, recently
released a report on the issues of science, evolution and creationism. The
publication is intended as a resource for people who find themselves
embroiled in debates about evolution.

13th Jan 2008 : Hernias, hiccups, and snores—oh, my! It's been 3.5 billion years, and the human body's past still plays a role in our lives and health.

10th Jan 2008 : This week's New Scientist has an article by Daniele Fanelli announcing an apparent change of mind by E O Wilson. This has been picked up by the Daily Telegraph under the headline Scientist renounces insect 'kin selection' theory and by the Independent under the headline Evolutionists at war over altruism's origins . New Scientist asked me to reply, but they gave me a very tight limit of 650 words. I decided that I could fit into this limit only with references to other publications, and I took great care to upload those publications to the web, and asked New Scientist to publish the url:

5th Jan 2008 : Parasitic caterpillars show local evolution as never before.

29th Dec 2007 : Weaver birds create intricate nests; sculptors and other artists and artisans also create intricate, ingenious constructions out of similar materials. The products may look similar, and outwardly the creative processes that create those processes may look similar, but there are surely large and important differences between them. What are they, and how important are they

26th Dec 2007 : Evolutionary principles impact our understanding of everything from cancer, through drug and pesticide resistance, to managing the environment to maintain biodiversity. But the US public understands evolution poorly, and the mere presence of the topic in public science education has sparked controversy.

20th Dec 2007 : The whale is descended from a deer-like animal that lived 48 million years ago, according to fossil evidence.

17th Dec 2007 : Sam Harris is best known for his barn-burning 2004 attack on religion, The End of Faith, which spent 33 weeks on the New York Times best-seller List. The book's sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation also came out in editions totalling hundreds of thousands. Last Monday, however, the combative Californian produced a shorter (seven pages) and seemingly calmer publication that will be a hit if it reaches 10,000 readers [note from Josh: we've had 75,000 unique visitors since last Tuesday when it was posted here] : "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty." It appears in the respected journal Annals of Neurology. And Harris, 40, claims it has little if any connection to his popular two books. Believers, however, may draw their own conclusions — and may want to read his subsequent neurological studies even more carefully.

17th Dec 2007 : It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA -- an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.

13th Dec 2007 :

11th Dec 2007 : Objective: The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. When we accept a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. The purpose of this study was to differentiate belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at the level of the brain.

9th Dec 2007 : The battle between science and creationism has reached the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where a former researcher is claiming he was fired because he doesn't believe in evolution.

3rd Dec 2007 : Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.

1st Dec 2007 : AUSTIN, Tex., Nov. 29 (AP) — The state's director of science curriculum said she resigned this month under pressure from officials who said she had given the appearance of criticizing the teaching of intelligent design.

29th Nov 2007 : Like us, our canine friends are able to form abstract concepts. Friederike Range and colleagues from the University of Vienna in Austria have shown for the first time that dogs can classify complex color photographs and place them into categories in the same way that humans do.

28th Nov 2007 :

21st Nov 2007 : The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers.

17th Nov 2007 : Fossil hunters exploring the eastern edge of the Rift Valley of Kenya have found the jawbone of a 10-million-year-old ape that appears to be a close relative of the last ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas.

15th Nov 2007 : A tropical fish that lives in mangrove swamps across the Americas can survive out of water for months at a time, similar to how animals adapted to land millions of years ago, a new study shows.

14th Nov 2007 : Creationists and intelligent-design boosters have a guerrilla tactic to undermine textbooks that don't jibe with their beliefs. They slap a sticker on the cover that reads, EVOLUTION IS A THEORY, NOT A FACT, REGARDING THE ORIGIN OF LIVING THINGS.

9th Nov 2007 : Mark Lawson interviews Sir David Attenborough

9th Nov 2007 : Turkana Boy, considered the most complete early human fossil, is being removed from his bomb-proof vault to take centre stage at an exhibition that curators say will provide the most complete record of the evolution of Man.

8th Nov 2007 : PARIS (AFP) - Small, fast-moving carnivorous dinosaurs had air-sac respiratory systems similar to modern-day penguins and other diving birds, scientists reported on Wednesday.

7th Nov 2007 :

6th Nov 2007 : Are humans "wired for empathy"? How does this affect what Chomsky calls the "manufacturing of consent"?

19th Oct 2007 : Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans some 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain.

15th Oct 2007 : A conversation with Cindy Lee Van Dover.

12th Oct 2007 : Apes are patient, but only people are fair. That may help explain why people came out on top

12th Oct 2007 : Scientists have discovered how a microscopic organism has benefited from nearly 80 million years without sex.

9th Oct 2007 : Human innate immunity differs between Africans and others, perhaps due to different infectious environments

3rd Oct 2007 : "Survival of the fittest" has popularly described evolution for more than a century, but a new study published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters provides further evidence that random genetic mutations over millions of years may also play a powerful role.

22nd Sept 2007 : Monkeys have a sense of justice. They will protest if they see another monkey get paid more for the same task.

21st Sept 2007 : It was the most astonishing anthropological find of a generation - a diminutive new species of human that apparently shared the planet with us until 13,000 years ago.

20th Sept 2007 : Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.