Doing battle with creationists may seem like a distraction, but it is important for public trust in science. … More ICYMI: My Presentation on Intelligent Design and Darwin Devolves at the CFI
These five women made possible the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of this decade. … More The Women Behind the Discovery of Richard III
I, a secular scientist, endorsed a book about Adam and Eve? Strange, but true. … More A Skeptic Encounters Adam and Eve
The very title of Behe’s book indicates a profound misunderstanding of evolutionary theory … More Darwin Devolves: “Devolution” is Not a Thing
If you live long enough, you get cancer. But without our mutating, blundering cells, we’d never have made it out of the primordial soup. … More The Inevitability of Cancer and Why It Makes Us Great
Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a teaser of my new book Human Errors (available May 1st!), which you can read here. As soon as the article dropped, I began to receive emails about the article, mostly positive, but I also knew from years of blogging about human evolution that not everyone would be … More A Creationist Response to “Human Errors” (and my rebuttal)
Researchers have developed a new method to discover the precise genetic differences between humans and our ape relatives. … More A New Method to Detect Natural Selection in Genes
In a recent episode of This World of Humans, I interview Dr. Dan Graur of the University of Houston about his recent paper entitled, An Upper Limit on the Functional Fraction of the Human Genome. … More How much of our genome is junk?
Despite being one of the most influential of the early modern biologists and having crucially paved the way for Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck has mostly gone down in history for being wrong. His theory of “use and disuse” as a mechanism for evolution was roundly rejected and is often presented in introductory biology textbooks as totally misguided and even … More In Defense of Lamarck: Historical, Philosophical, and Biological Vindication of Evolution’s First Big Idea
Earlier this year, Columbia University Press published a book entitled “Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome” by Nessa Carey. A popular science book written for a general audience, “Junk DNA” is an exploration of all the ways that DNA can function without coding for proteins. As the author rightly decries, the protein-coding regions of our DNA have gotten … More Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome
