Evolution
Why You Should Care About Acoelomorph Flatworms
Greg Laden is guest-blogging this week while Sarah is on vacation. You can find his regular blog at Scienceblogs.com and Quiche Moraine.Darwin proposed that all species arose from a single common ancestor, and that this process involved almost uncountable branching events over eons of time. Workin...
October 01, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
Fabulous New Fossil of a Human Ancestor
A 4.4-million-year-old hominin is shaking up our understanding of human evolution this morning. The first bits of the new species, called Ardipithecus ramidus, were discovered in 1994, and now (it took a while), scientists are publishing an exhaustive analysis of the hominin and the habitat in whic...
October 01, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
The Origin of the Komodo Dragon
Greg Laden is guest-blogging this week while Sarah is on vacation. You can find his regular blog at Scienceblogs.com and Quiche Moraine.The world's largest living lizard is the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), a type of "varanid" lizard. Despite the fact that Komodo dragons are very interestin...
September 30, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
Toad "Fraud" May Have Been Ahead of His Time
Before Charles Darwin, there was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French naturalist who proposed that an organism could pass to its offspring characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime. The classic example is the idea that giraffes got their long necks by gradually stretching them over successi...
September 03, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Hominids' African Origins, 50 Years Later
The next time a creationist spouts some nonsense about how the lack of a fossil record undermines the theory of evolution, direct them to the hominid family tree. If you haven't read much about human origins lately, it might come as a surprise that so many species have been identified (and more all...
July 23, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Darwin for Dads and More Science Finds in the August Issue
When my daughter was small, I used to take her to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, I would explain why the dinosaurs disappeared and how mankind evolved from our primitive forebears. She seemed rapt. But a few weeks ago, after hearing me on the radio discuss a new boo...
July 21, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Two Minutes to Understanding the Theory of Evolution
I was glancing through YouTube yesterday and came across this wonderful video, "The Theory of Evolution in 2 Minutes." (I also realized that YouTube's grouping of science and technology together can be very annoying—the day after the latest Apple conference, everything is about the iPhone.) And if ...
June 11, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Humans Don’t Have the Last, or Only, Laugh
Anyone who has visited a zoo can attest to the human-like qualities of our close relatives. Whether you’re watching chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans or gorillas, it’s the facial expressions and social interactions that most make them appear similar to humans. Now researchers have evidence of anothe...
June 10, 2009 |
By Ashley Luthern
The Hubbub About Ida
It's been a fascinating week here in the world of science communication. By now you've heard of Ida, the beautifully fossilized 47-million-year-old primate that may or (more likely) may not be a human ancestor? It's a gorgeous fossil from an important era of primate evolution, and its presentation ...
May 26, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
UPDATED: Small Victory for Science -- Previously: Texas Science Education Stands at the Edge of the Abyss
UPDATE: According to a report from the Dallas Morning News, the Texas Board of Education rejected restoring the "strengths and weaknesses" proposal by a 7-7 split vote. A final vote will come on Friday, but the vote is expected to remain deadlocked.My freshman year of high school, when the teacher...
March 26, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Creationists Visit the Natural History Museum
Everyone is welcome at the Smithsonian Institution, though we locals may grumble when our museums start to fill up with tourists in the spring. But I’m not sure which of these I would find more annoying on a trip through the National Museum of Natural History: 40 hyperactive first graders or the Ad...
March 12, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Emotional Expression in Apes Going Ape
One of the big themes of this year's AAAS meeting was—you guessed it— Charles Darwin. It seemed like every session's chairperson was obliged to mention Darwin's 200th birthday, and some scientists even sounded like they were channeling him at a seance.Scientists have been talking about Darwin's fin...
February 19, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Dispatch from AAAS--Big Fish and other Award-Winning Stories
This weekend, fellow blogger Sarah and I are writing from the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago. If you ever get a chance to attend an AAAS meeting, by all means, go. It's basically a greatest hits of science conference. The scientists are under orders to make their talks comprehensible to a non-speci...
February 15, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Dispatch from AAAS--Naming the 1000th Steve
This weekend, blog overseer Laura and I are writing from the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago. Steve Darwin, a botanist at the University of Tulane, was named the 1000th Steve--the kilosteve--last night. Project Steve, the brainchild of Eugenie Scott at the National Center for Science Education, bega...
February 14, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Darwin Rocks
Lectures, symposia, essays and articles are not my idea of a birthday party, but that’s how institutions around the world are celebrating Charles Darwin’s big 2-0-0. In my opinion, you can’t have a party without drink and dance, and luckily Darwin is a muse for scientists and entertainers alike. P...
February 13, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Pictures of the Week--Orchids
Can anyone identify the orchids in these photos? I visited the orchid show at the Natural History Museum last week (Orchids through Darwin’s Eyes, which runs until April 26) intending to learn more about Darwin and his orchid research, as well as take a few photos for the blog. But I got distracted...
February 13, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Year of Charles Darwin Ultimate Tour (Part 2)
Back in December, I wondered if you could plan an itinerary for the entire year in which everything you did was Darwin-related. I quickly discovered that planning itineraries is hard work (my friends over at Smithsonian Journeys do this every day—they are amazing) and stopped in early May, leaving ...
February 12, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Go to the Galápagos, See What Charles Darwin Saw
A senior editor visited the Galapagos - here's what she saw
February 02, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
What Darwin Didn't Know
Today's scientists marvel that the 19th-century naturalist's grand vision of evolution is still the key to life
February 2009 |
By Thomas Hayden
Lincoln vs. Darwin (Part 4 of 4)
On this blog, several of the staff of Smithsonian magazine have been debating who was more important, Abraham Lincoln or Charles Darwin. T.A. Frail and Mark Strauss argued for Lincoln and Laura Helmuth for Darwin. And now it’s my turn.I’m not going to take up Mark’s challenge and attempt to argue t...
January 27, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
