Skeptophilia

Last week a gardener friend and I were talking about the fact that some plants are extreme specialists -- they only thrive in a very narrow ...

Know what a kludge  is? Coined by writer Jackson Granholm in 1962, a kludge  is "an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, f...

One of the many fascinating aspects of evolution is how nature happens upon the same solutions to environmental problems, over and over. Two...

One of the most misunderstood pieces of the evolutionary model is that natural selection is almost always a compromise. Very few changes tha...

One of the subtlest features of the evolutionary model, and one often misunderstood even by people who understand and accept natural selecti...

If humans operated by logic, rationality, and evidence, there would be arguments we would no longer be having.  A sampler: Climate change is...

In evolutionary biology, it's always a little risky to attribute a feature to a specific selective pressure. Why, for example, do humans...

In order to produce new species -- so goes the evolutionary model -- you need two things: isolation (splitting off the population that will ...

The diversity you find among birds is really remarkable. There are differences in bill shape, from the weird angled beaks of flamingos, ...

Natural selection is such an amazing driver of diversity.  As Richard Dawkins showed so brilliantly in his tour-de-force  The Blind Watchmak...