4th Nov 2009 : Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a theoretical model that informs the understanding of evolution and determines how quickly an organism will evolve using a catalogue of "evolutionary speed limits."

4th Nov 2009 : Jerry Coyne explains 'Why Evolution Is True' (also the title of his excellent new book) at the Atheist Alliance International 2009 conference, sponsored by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

3rd Nov 2009 : Dan Dennett links culture, evolution and philosophy during a lecture in Oslo.

2nd Nov 2009 : The world's oldest spider web spun when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth has been found encased in a Prehistoric piece of amber from a beach in the south of England.

1st Nov 2009 : Featuring a superb cast and commentators including David Suzuki, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Iain McCalman, this is the story of how four young voyagers changed our world forever.

29th Oct 2009 : Approximately 120-130 million years ago, one of the most significant events in the history of the Earth occurred: the first flowering plants

23rd Oct 2009 : It is the greatest animal battle on the planet, and it has finally been caught on camera.

21st Oct 2009 : Although advances in medical care have improved standards of living over time, humans aren't entirely sheltered from the forces of natural selection, a new study shows.

20th Oct 2009 : ScienceDaily (Oct. 19, 2009) — A 21-year Michigan State University experiment that distills the essence of evolution in laboratory flasks not only demonstrates natural selection at work, but could lead to biotechnology and medical research advances, researchers sai

10th Oct 2009 : PZ Myers' lecture at the Atheist Alliance International 2009 conference in Burbank, CA.

2nd Oct 2009 : New study of the brain shows that facts and beliefs are processed in exactly the same way. News version of PLoS article The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief.

27th Sept 2009 : This is a showcase for the benefit of those who may be sceptical about their finer or deeper feelings, says Nicholas Lezard

26th Sept 2009 : Alan Alda talks to scientist Dan Lieberman about why the human ability to run could be an important prerequisite for the evolution of our bigger brains -- and the emergence of our human spark.

21st Sept 2009 : India plans to bring back the cheetah, nearly half a century after it became extinct in the country. The BBC's Soutik Biswas considers whether it is a good idea.

16th Sept 2009 : An international team of researchers, including Monash University biochemists, has discovered evidence at the molecular level in support of one of the key tenets of Darwin's theory of evolution.

12th Sept 2009 : BBC 4 program now available on YouTube. RDFRS post on the series from July 6 http://richarddawkins.net/article,4029,-Inside-Natures-Giants,Richard-Dawkins---Chanel-4

10th Sept 2009 : Analysis of a rock type found only in the world's oldest oceans has shed new light on how large animals first got a foothold on Earth.

5th Sept 2009 : The new hypothesis suggests that life on Earth originated at photosynthetically-active porous structures made of zinc sulfide similar to deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Credit: The Institute for Exploration, the University of Rhode Island (URI) Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO), and the URI Institute for Archaeological Oceanography.

1st Sept 2009 : Birds, more than any other group of animals, are a celebration of color. They have evolved to every extreme of the spectrum, from the hot pink of flamingos to the shimmering blue of a peacock’s neck. Yet, for decades, paleontologists who study extinct birds have had to use their imaginations to see the colors in the fossils

1st Sept 2009 : In the past, most people who went to Angola were searching for oil, diamonds or landmines.

Now, the country is also proving a big draw for fossil hunters - known in the scientific community as palaeontologists - who have described Angola as a "museum in the ground".

29th Aug 2009 : Intricate cellular components are often cited as evidence of intelligent design. They couldn’t have evolved, I.D. proponents say, because they can’t be broken down into smaller, simpler functional parts. They are irreducibly complex, so they must have been intentionally designed, as is, by an intelligent entity.

25th Aug 2009 : A fossil of a "walking seal." Audio program Quirks & Quarks

14th Jul 2009 : The remains of a 65 million years old sea urchin found at Stevns Klint has turned out to be a sensational find, described as a 'missing link' by one expert.

13th Jul 2009 : Scientists have revealed a spectacular insight into turtle evolution - how the unique animals get their shells.

12th Jul 2009 : Scientists think they have solved the riddle of how flowers came to dominate the conifers and ferns that preceded them.

6th Jul 2009 : This four-part science series uncovers the anatomical secrets of some of the animal kingdom's most extraordinary species.

All our ancestors came from the sea and obviously went through great trouble to leave the sea and radically change to live on land.

19th May 2009 : The beautifully preserved remains of a 47-million-year-old, lemur-like creature have been unveiled in the US.

16th May 2009 : A nice, specific request: name a gene that shows no signs of an evolutionary origin.

11th May 2009 : Once upon a time, four blind men were walking in the forest, and they bumped into an elephant.

13th Feb 2009 : Michael Egnor is a neurosurgeon at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. For the sake of his patients, one must hope that he understands the brain's anatomy better than its provenance. In an article on this site, "A Neurosurgeon, Not A Darwinist," he claims that the theory of evolution is bogus.

9th Feb 2009 : Dawkins reads engagingly, and the whole effect is like David Attenborough without the pictures.

7th Feb 2009 : Professor Richard Dawkins explains the importance of Charles Darwin, what evolution means and why the National Geographic Channel should celebrate the bi-centenary of his birth.

1st Feb 2009 : The last place scientists expected to find the fossil of a freshwater, tropical turtle was in the Arctic. But they did.

31st Jan 2009 : British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough presents his views on Charles Darwin, natural selection, and how the Bible has put the natural world in peril in an exclusive interview for Nature Video.

29th Jan 2009 : This book spectacularly humanises him, showing how he was driven by the great moral cause of his day: opposition to slavery.

28th Jan 2009 : Which facts about evolution had to be true, and which just happen to be true?

24th Jan 2009 : Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Tracy Langkilde has shown that native fence lizards in the southeastern United States are adapting to potentially fatal invasive fire-ant attacks by developing behaviors that enable them to escape from the ants, as well as by developing longer hind legs, which can increase the effectiveness of this behavior.

22nd Jan 2009 : IN JULY 1837, Charles Darwin had a flash of inspiration. In his study at his house in London, he turned to a new page in his red leather notebook and wrote, "I think". Then he drew a spindly sketch of a tree.

21st Jan 2009 : Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809--the same day as Abraham Lincoln--and published his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, fifty years later.

20th Jan 2009 : Richard Dawkins' Extended Phenotype (EP) concept is as relevant now as when it was first proposed 26 years ago and is not at odds with other evolutionary explanations.

19th Jan 2009 : As the world celebrates two Charles Darwin anniversaries – 200 years since his birth and 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species – it is sad to reflect how far we still are from the scientific enlightenment he promised.

15th Jan 2009 : In an article in today's Nature, Uppsala researcher Martin Brazeau describes the skull and jaws of a fish that lived about 410 million years ago. The study may give important clues to the origin of jawed vertebrates, and thus ultimately our own evolution.

15th Jan 2009 : Charles Darwin effectively rewrote the history of not only Man, but every living thing on the planet. This special section looks at the legacy of the man whose ideas changed everything

14th Jan 2009 : An ET appeared one day to lay to rest once and for all whether or not ETs have visited earth.

13th Jan 2009 : Practice of hunting and harvesting the biggest animals or plants is changing species much faster than nature, researchers find

12th Jan 2009 : Matt Ridley says that Darwinian selection explains the appearance of seemingly ‘designed’ complexity throughout the world — not just in biology but in the economy, technology and the arts

8th Jan 2009 : A Pacific fish uses mirrors as well as lenses to help it see in the murky ocean depths, scientists have revealed.

8th Jan 2009 : A new molecule that performs the essential function of life – self-replication – could shed light on the origin of all living things.

6th Jan 2009 : Pink iguanas unknown to Charles Darwin during his visits to the Galapagos islands may provide evidence of species divergence far earlier than the English naturalist's famous finches, researchers said Monday.

6th Jan 2009 : Scientists in China say they believe a group of dinosaur fossils discovered in the east of the country could be the largest collection ever found.

5th Jan 2009 : 10 lectures of around two hours each on Darwin's Legacy from Stanford University.

5th Jan 2009 : Savage-Rumbaugh's work with bonobo apes, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching, forces the audience to rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology -- and how much by cultural exposure.

3rd Jan 2009 : This week, Nature magazine published a short list of recent important developments in evolutionary biology that support the theory of evolution, as a tool to help explain that evolution is definitely a dynamic and useful theory in our field and to demonstrate that the evidence is still growing.

31rd Dec 2008 : In a recently conducted study, a multidisciplinary French-American research team with expertise in archaeology, past climates, and ecology reported that Neanderthal extinction was principally a result of competition with Cro-Magnon populations, rather than the consequences of climate change.

23rd Dec 2008 : With the aid of a straightforward experiment, researchers have provided some clues to one of biology's most complex questions: how ancient organic molecules came together to form the basis of life.

22nd Dec 2008 : Here is some terrific video of a bioluminescent deep-sea siphonophore — an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity.

18th Dec 2008 : Paleontologists claim they have unearthed a new type of pterosaur and a previously unknown sauropod dinosaur in the Sahara Desert.

18th Dec 2008 : A team of Canadian and French scientists has shed new light on what's being called the Earth's "last universal common ancestor," the 3.8-billion-year-old microscopic organism from which all living things - bacteria and humans and sunflowers alike - evolved.

16th Dec 2008 : A rat believed to be extinct for 11 million years, a spider with a foot-long legspan, and a hot pink cyanide-producing "dragon millipede" are among the thousand newly discovered species in the largely unexplored Mekong Delta region.

15th Dec 2008 : A Victorian amateur undertook a lifetime pursuit of slow, meticulous observation and thought about the natural world, producing a theory 150 years ago that still drives the contemporary scientific agenda

13th Dec 2008 : The star of the 2008 Penn Reading Project and everyone's favorite tetrapod, Tiktaalik now has his own music video!

6th Dec 2008 : To navigate the currents of ecological fate, most creatures adapt — but a few have stuck to their evolutionary guns.

2nd Dec 2008 : Richard Dawkins sits down with Aubrey Manning to discuss Ethology, their time at Oxford, the state of life on Earth, and more.

1st Dec 2008 : Now this is an interesting beast. It's a 220 million year old fossil from China of an animal that is distinctly turtle-like.

24th Nov 2008 : Scientists dream of synthesizing life that is utterly alien to this world—both to better understand the minimum components required for life (as part of the quest to uncover the essence of life and how life originated on earth) and, frankly, to see if they can do it.

20th Nov 2008 : New research could explain why females of many species have multiple partners.

20th Nov 2008 : Slowly rolling across the ocean floor, a humble single-celled creature is poised to revolutionize our understanding of how complex life evolved on Earth.

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.