evolution

Walking on eggs to teach evolution to those opposed to accepting it ...

Quoted: David Campbell is bringing Florida’s mandate to teach evolution to many students raised to take the biblical creation story as fact.

This is so good

Quoted: Another very good argument against evolution.

Way cool

Quoted: Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

Quoted: sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

This is an absolute trip. The threespine stickleback fish living in Lake Washington have de-evolved since the lake was cleaned up. Nature is amazing!

Quoted: Lake Washington the largest lake in the Seattle area has long been home to a soft-skinned fish called the threespine

I find evolutionary arms races pretty fascinating

Quoted: It is an arms race—and a matter of adapting and counter-adapting, explains Dr Welbergen. The better the cuckoo disguises its eggs and itself, the more host birds improve their ability to spot the impostor. Although such an evolutionary dynamic may seem like something that exists only in the wild, it is possible for it to happen in human society as well—between cuckolds and their cheating partners, constantly driving men to be better at detecting adultery and women to be better at getting away with it.

Quoted: Goals of the mission include creating a Web resource that contributes to our understanding of human origins; educating and inspiring the next generation of scientists; providing means of research for global and indigenous paleontologists, geologists, scientists, and students; creating a collaborative community and virtual meeting space for anyone interested in human origins; and presenting a prehistory of early humans.

Mindblowing stuff!

Claude Shannon's groundbreaking paper which attempts to define information and communication mathematically. This is a must read for any evolution theorist, or Intelligent Design Proponent, as many people have a hard time understanding exactly how we conventionally define information in math and physics.

For instance, the argument that mutations in DNA, because they are random, delete information from a genome and decrease the overall informational content of a chromosome is completely and provably wrong, according to Shannon's definition of information, which is the most widely accepted. In reality, a purely random deletion or substitution MUST add information because it is summarily unpredictable and incompressible by any known compression algorithm.