Looks like Jay Fitzgerald and I both finished Sam Tanenhaus’s book at the same time. He also beat me to a review…which I pretty much agree with.

Elmore Leonard wins the PEN USA award for lifetime achievement.

Larry Moran, worth quoting in full: Sometime tomorrow Richard Dawkins will be presenting the Richard Dawkins Award to Bill Maher at the Atheist Alliance International convention in Los Angeles. Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because Bill Maher is a kook. He believes in all kinds of strange things about alternative medicine, cancer,… Continue reading

The fascinating find of the oldest hominid skeleton so far prompts a new evaluation of human evolution: The new fossils of Ardipithecus ramidus — known as ‘Ardi’ — offer the first substantial view of the biology of a species close to the time of the last common ancestor, estimated to be at least 6 million… Continue reading

Following up on my earlier post about common misconceptions students have with natural selection, this sample from a recent paper by Abraham, Meir et al starts with a sample illustrating the source and “frequency of student use of misconceptions about natural selection in pretest open-response questions”. (click on the picture to make clearer)