Free Republic

<p>Faced with those choices, a 61-year-old West Bloomfield man parried away a shotgun barrel as it fired, forcing a buckshot load of lead over his shoulder. The township man then drew his own handgun and shot an intruder inside his garage in the 4800 block of Trailview at 3 a.m. July 4.</p>

A high school science teacher vowed yesterday to continue telling his Inuit students about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, despite complaints from parents in the northern Quebec community of Salluit. Science teacher Alexandre April was given a written reprimand last month by his principal at Ikusik High School for discussing evolution in class. Parents in the village 1,860 kilometres north of Montreal complained their children had been told they came from apes. "I am a biologist. ... This is what I'm passionate about," said April, who teaches Grades 7 and 8. "It interests the students. It gets them asking questions....

Human interaction with animals could be causing evolution to go into reverse, says a report by the Royal Society, Britain's science academy. A study of finches on the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific – finches are the same birds that were said to have inspired Charles Darwin's groundbreaking work on evolution - has shown that some could be losing their distinctive beaks in response to living near humans. Finches on the islands have developed different sizes of beak - but when people live in close proximity to the birds, their beaks revert to an intermediate size, the report says. Andrew...