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The breakup of giant icebergs may have forced minor evolutionary changes in penguins over the past 6,000 years, a new study suggests. The Antarctic iceberg chunks, which break off the continent now and then, are thought to have blocked the swim paths of Adelie penguins returning home to their colonies. Some of the penguins were forced to become immigrants in other colonies, where they established new homes and interbred with the locals. As a result, genetic changes that might otherwise have remained isolated became widespread among the different colonies. The result is what scientist call microevolution. Other examples Microevolution involves...

Picky female frogs in a tiny rainforest outpost of Australia have driven the evolution of a new species in 8,000 years or less, according to scientists from the University of Queensland, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. "That's lightning-fast," said co-author Craig Moritz, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley and director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. "To find a recently evolved species like this is exceptional, at least in my experience." The yet-to-be-named species arose after two isolated populations of the green-eyed tree frog reestablished contact less than 8,000 years ago and...

Ernst Mayr, a biologist who expanded upon Darwin's theory of evolution, died on February 3 at the age of 100. While he also earned acclaim as an ornithologist, naturalist, and historian of biology during his eight-decade career, Mayr will be best remembered as a champion of evolutionary theory.Mayr's major contribution came in 1942, when his book Systematics and the Origin of Species was published. Here, Mayr laid one of the cornerstones of the then new synthetic theory of evolution, which unified Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity. One of the shortcomings of...

Boise -- A Boy Scout who was using a cable to glide between two trees at a summer camp died after losing his grip and plunging 15 feet, authorities said.

Autocatakinetics, Evolution, and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production By Rod Swenson An Excerpt: Ecological science addresses the relations of living things to their environments, and the study of human ecology the particular case of humans. There is an opposing tradition built into the foundations of modern science of separating living things, and, in particular, humans from their environments. Beginning with Descartes’ dualistic world view, this tradition found its way into biology by way of Kant, and evolutionary theory through Darwin, and manifests itself in two main postulates of incommensurability, the incommensurability between psychology and physics (the “first postulate of...

The family of Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist killed by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer in Rafah two years ago, sued the State of Israel and the IDF for damages in the Haifa District Court on Tuesday. The 24-year-old Corrie was killed on March 16, 2003 when she tried to block an IDF bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian house near the Philadelphi Route, the strip of land in the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt. An IDF investigation ruled the incident was an accident and that the driver did not see Corrie, and the military prosecutor's office decided not to press charges...

What happened to the rare tribes? SANJAY DUTTA & CHANDRIKA MAGO TUESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2004 11:19:06 PM NEW DELHI: An enormous anthropological disaster is in the making. The killer tsunami is feared to have wiped out entire tribes — already threatened by their precariously small numbers — perhaps rendering them extinct and snapping the slender tie with a lost generation. Officials involved in rescue operations are pessimistic, but still keeping their fingers crossed for the Sentinelese and Nicobarese, the two tribes seen as bearing the brunt of the killer wave. The bigger fear is for the Sentinelese, anthropologically the most...

Humans march to a faster genetic 'drummer' than primates, UC Riverside research says *Research runs counter to Darwin's theory of natural selection* A team of biochemists from UC Riverside published a paper in the June 11 issue of the Journal of Molecular Biology that gives one explanation for why humans and primates are so closely related genetically, but so clearly different biologically and intellectually. It is an established fact that 98 percent of the DNA, or the code of life, is exactly the same between humans and chimpanzees. So the key to what it means to be human resides in...

Every species seems to come and go. Some last longer than others, but nothing lasts forever. Humans are a relatively recent phenomenon, jumping out of trees and striding across the land around 200 000 years ago. Will we persist for many millions of years to come, or are we headed for an evolutionary makeover, or even extinction? According to Reinhard Stindl, of the Institute of Medical Biology in Vienna, the answer to this question could lie at the tips of our chromosomes. In a controversial new theory he suggests that all eukaryotic species (everything except bacteria and algae) have an...

ifty years before Darwin defended his theory of evolution in ''The Origin of Species,'' the French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck put forward a theory of his own. For Lamarck, life has an inherent tendency to develop from simple to complex through a preordained sequence of stages. The lineage to which human beings belong is the oldest, since we are the most complex of living things. Present-day worms belong to a lineage that is much younger, since they are simpler. For Lamarck, today's human beings and worms do not have a common ancestor, even though human beings derive from wormlike ancestors....

Wednesday, August 27, 2003Cheney wields considerable power behind the scenesBy HELEN THOMAS HEARST NEWSPAPERSWASHINGTON -- Some vice presidents have been dubbed "the most powerful vice president in American history" while they were in office.Reporters during the Carter administration gave that title to Vice President Walter Mondale, the former U.S. senator serving in the administration of the former governor of Georgia.When veteran Washington insider George Bush was vice president in the administration of President Reagan, we got the sense that Bush was highly influential in Reagan's major policy decisions. So Bush then became the most powerful vice president in American...

Olympia Woman Killed In Anti-Israel Demonstration March 16, 2003 By Emily Langlie GAZA CITY - Friends describe Rachel Corrie, from Olympia, as an especially caring and empathetic young woman. They say she was drawn to try to help in the Palestinians in Gaza. She was interviewed there just last week about her efforts to stop Israeli army bulldozers. On March 5th she said "these are homes that don't have any connection necessarily with suicide bombers. These are homes that just happened to be in a place that the Israeli military finds strategically important to them." Rachel was with a group...

Hizballah misfires first missile of Iraqi shipment DEBKAfile Exclusive Report December 30, 2002, 11:08 PM (GMT+02:00) Hizballah adds Iraqi missiles to Syrian, Iranian arsenal The powerful blast that reverberated across eastern and central Lebanon Sunday, December 29, was caused by the explosion of a big surface missile in Hizballah hands and of Iraqi origin. Reporting this, DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and Lebanese sources reveal that the Lebanese Shiite terrorist group has recently taken delivery of a shipment of surface missiles, presumed to be medium-range, from the Iraqi army. The blast occurred at a Hizballah training camp near a village called Janta...

Man hit while chasing half-full beer can across freeway Police say a man was struck by a truck after he ran across the freeway chasing a partially empty beer can. ABC13 Eyewitness News (10/15/02) — A rush hour accident brought traffic to a halt on the Southwest Freeway. Around 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, a man was struck by a black Chevy truck. The driver stopped to render aid to the victim. Police say the man who was hit was running across the freeway chasing after a partially empty can of beer. The victim was taken to Memorial Hermann Hospital where...

Stephen Wolfram on Natural Selection Excerpts from A New Kind of Science, ©2002, Stephen Wolfram, LLC The basic notion that organisms tend to evolve to achieve a maximum fitness has certainly in the past been very useful in providing a general framework for understanding the historical progression of species, and in yielding specific explanations for various fairly simple properties of particular species. But in present-day thinking about biology the notion has tended to be taken to an extreme, so that especially among those not in daily contact with detailed data on biological systems it has come to be assumed that...

The peppered moths have been an evolutionary textbook icon for many years. Is this indeed evidence for evolution through 'industrial melanism', or is it simply an extrapolation from a very modest and common phenonemon, variation within a species population of different predominant characteristics?Biologist and evolutionist Kenneth Miller has written an interesting FAQ on peppered moths, calling 'industrial melanism' 'evolution in action' at http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/Moths/moths.html. Has he overstated the case? I have made a critique of Miller's arguments and presented them here. Mr. James Lippard, an atheist and part of the infidels forum on the net, has not really challenged my arguments,...

It is by no means certain to thinkers today that there is such a thing as human nature. And it goes without saying that this uncertainty or denial is fraught with weighty consequences. If there is no human nature, what and who are we? From the sky we do not look terribly significant. Ants on an apple. From the moon even less so, regardless of the telescopic technology. Moreover, if there is no universal human nature, can we talk meaningfully and convincingly about human morals and human rights? Rights that are not merely the legal devices of some social contract,...

Few things are as automatic, or as merciless, as natural selection. That's why we must respect it. It's also why we fight it, albeit vainly, with every fiber of our beings.The recent collapse of Enron, portrayed by many pundits as a national disaster, is in reality only a disaster for Enron and those who over-invested in it. The free market is nice that way: it automatically contains the losses from bad decisions, limiting the damage to those who made them. Granted, it's no fun to be among the losers at such a time. We can be thankful that we're not...