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Full Title:A Lapse in Watchfulness: New York Times Admits Neo-Darwinism Faces a "Paradigm Shift" Over "Failure" to Explain Body Plans Despite keeping a watchful eye out for inklings of heresy on Darwinian evolution, the New York Times occasionally lets its guard down. Such a lapse was the only way to explain the recent review of Harvard computer scientist Leslie Valiant's book Probably Approximately Correct in which Berkeley mathematician Edward Frenkel was allowed to acknowledge a "gaping gap" in "Darwin's theory." Now a colleague has pointed out to me a 2007 article in the Times that I hadn't previously seen. The...

The fossilised remains of microbes that lived beside the sea in the earliest chapter of life on Earth have been discovered in a slab of rock in Western Australia. Researchers found the tiny fossils in rock formations that date to 3.4bn years ago, making them strong candidates to be the oldest microbes found. Some clung to grains of sand that had gathered on one of the first known stretches of beach. The findings paint a vivid picture of life arising when the first landmasses began to emerge in fragmentary fashion from the oceans. At the time, volcanic eruptions spewed gas...

Enlarge ImageVestiges. A fossil form of Ediacara called Fractofusus andersoni provides evidence of an ancient explosion of life.Credit: Bing Shen/Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [VIA SCIENCE] Researchers have uncovered what they think is a sudden diversification of life at least 30 million years before the Cambrian period, the time when most of the major living groups of animals emerged. If confirmed, the find reinforces the idea that major evolutionary innovations occurred in bursts. The main points of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which he carefully laid out in The Origin of Species 149 years ago, have stood the...

The sabretooth tiger may have looked a fearsome sight with its massive canines but its reputation takes something of a knock with a new piece of research. Scientists who have studied the extinct creature's skull in detail say it had a relatively weak bite - compared with, say, a modern lion. And although those fangs must have been amazing killing implements, they made for a very restricted hunting strategy.....

TBILISI, Georgia - Archaeologists in the former Soviet republic of Georgia have unearthed a skull they say is 1.8 million years old — part of a find that holds the oldest traces of humankind's closest ancestors ever found in Europe. The skull from an early member of the genus Homo was found Aug. 6 and unearthed Sunday in Dmanisi, an area about 60 miles southeast of the capital, Tbilisi, said David Lortkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum, who took part in the dig. In total, five bones or fragments believed to be about the same age have been found...

An article purporting to show simple mathematical relationships in Biology and Ecology.