Evolution, features and articles | Educational Science

Nov 30, 2004

The Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths)

The Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths) Creationism and intelligent design are not science, whereas evolution is a solid scientific theory. (Image credit: LiveScience)Several parents won a lawsuit against a Pennsylvania school district in 2005 that had added the controversial theory of intelligent design to its curriculum. Unlike the...

Nov 30, 2005

When Humans and Chimps Split

A new study of genes in humans and chimpanzees pins down with greater accuracy when the two species split from one. The evolutionary divergence occurred between 5 million and 7 million years ago, an estimate that improves on the previous range of 3 million to 13 million years in the...

Nov 30, 2005

Study: Guppies Have Menopause, Too

For female guppies, there's more to life than making babies. A new study finds that guppies experience menopause just like humans and other animals. The study is the first demonstration of menopause in fish and raises the question of why some female animals live beyond their fertile years at all....

Oct 31, 2005

Town Vote Seen as Referendum on 'Intelligent Design'

DOVER, Pa. (AP) -- A battle over a policy requiring that ninth-graders in this rural community learn about intelligent design'' in biology class is being fought on two fronts -- one political, one legal. In a federal courtroom in Harrisburg, 20 miles away, a judge is hearing arguments in the...

Oct 31, 2005

University to Teach 'Intelligent Design' as Myth

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- Creationism and intelligent design are going to be studied at the University of Kansas, but not in the way advocated by opponents of the theory of evolution. A course being offered next semester by the university religious studies department is titled Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent...

Aug 31, 2005

Court Case Threatens to 'Drag Science into the Supernatural'

A court case that begins Monday in Pennsylvania will be the first to determine whether it is legal to teach a controversial idea called intelligent design in public schools. Intelligent design, often referred to as ID, has been touted in recent years by a small group of proponents as an...

Aug 31, 2005

Intelligent Design: 'The Death of Science'

In his highly influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science philosopher Thomas Kuhn presented the idea that science is not a gradual progression toward truth, but a series of insurgencies, with scientific theories constantly usurping one another. That is sometimes true. And proponents of intelligent design love Kuhn's argument....

Aug 31, 2005

Opening Arguments Made in 'Intelligent Design' Court Case

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) -- A school district went to court Monday to defend its policy of telling students that a higher power may have created life -- an alternative to the evolution theory they are already learning. Eight families are suing the Dover Area School District where the teen students...

Jun 30, 2005

Zonkeys, Wolphins and Ligers: Nature Loves a Hybrid

Although they capture the imagination, the liger (lion/tiger), the wholphin (whale/dolphin), and the zonkey (zebra/donkey) are all hybrids that are unlikely to be found in the wild. But new research into a certain fruit fly may be evidence that hybrids are more common in nature than thought. Like the mule...

Aug 31, 2006

Tenacious Neanderthals Held Out in Pockets

Neanderthals might have held out in isolated refuges for thousands of years longer than previously thought, scientists reported today. Their survival at what seems to have been their last refuge in Gibraltar for far longer after the arrival of modern humans than once believed suggests our ancestors may not have...

Feb 28, 2006

Why We Have Sex: It's Cleansing

Scientists have long wondered why organisms bother with sexual reproduction. It makes a whole lot more sense to just have a bunch of females that can clone themselves, which is how asexual reproduction works. Turns out sex might have evolved as a way to concentrate lots of harmful mutations into...

Nov 30, 2007

Mountains of Evidence Suggest Human Evolution Had Rocky Start

Geology may be a long-overlooked, major factor that created conditions favoring the evolution of modern humans. That's the conclusion of geologists at the University of Utah, who detail their findings in next month's issue of the journal Geotimes. It's fairly well-established that changing climate, and thus vegetation, in East Africa...

Oct 31, 2007

Evolutionary 'Big Bang' Created Florist's Paradise

From the ubiquitous daisy to the fantastical orchid, flowering plant species are as diverse as they are numerous. Turns out, these bloomers went through an evolutionary Big Bang of sorts some 130 million years ago, a brief era of explosive floral diversification at a time when dinosaurs walked the Earth....

Oct 31, 2007

Pre-Human Dating Scene Revealed

Humans basically court each other one-on-one today, but 2 million-year-old skulls tucked away in South African caves suggest that our ancient male relatives dated troops of females. The bones belonged to Paranthropus robustus hominids, mostly males. These extinct human relatives split away from our evolutionary track about 2.5 million years...

Sep 30, 2007

Human Ancestors Walked Upright, Study Claims

The ancestors of humanity are often depicted as knuckle-draggers, making humans seem unusual in our family tree as upright apes. Controversial research now suggests the ancestors of humans and the other great apes might have actually walked upright too, making knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas the exceptions and not the rule....