Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Bug with bifocals baffles biologists

Bug with bifocals baffles biologists

Just about everything we can "invented" has already been done, usually better, somewhere amongst living things. In fact bacteria invented the wheel millions of years before we did. Arthropods invented communal living and division of labor millions of years before we did. Birds, bats, and insects all invented flight millions of years before we did.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

It's a new school year!

Time to crank up the blog and welcome students from my Contemporary Issues in Science class.

Over the summer I read (most of) An Ancestor's Tale.  What an amazing book.  Although Dawkin's outspoken atheism can be off-putting, his command of zoology, genetics, and evolutionary theory deserve acclaim.

In other news, new fossils push back the origin of animal life even further - 650 million years.  As I've said before, advances in technology always seem to push the dates further back into our planet's history.  The dates rarely come forward.  The antiquity of "life" continues to astound.