Continents Move, Life Evolves
13.7 billion years of evolution in 85 seconds.
A keynote lecture by John Haught at the 2006 “Beyond Intelligent Design” symposium. The lecture is followed by a panel response including Ian Barbour, George Ellis, and Nancey Murphy, moderated by William Grassie. Evolutionary biology contributes much to our present understanding of life, and its promises also to deepen our understanding of human intelligence, ethics and…
From an evolutionary standpoint, the key players in the mating game were males with poor fighting skills and females faithful to them.
Fifty-five million years ago, the world abruptly warmed by a scorching 5 degrees Celsius, the oceans turned acidic, and life ran a gantlet of extinction. Sound familiar? That was the closest nature ever came to foreshadowing the fossil-fuel-fed warming that is just getting underway now. But for 15 years, climate scientists have puzzled over how…
UN climate talks in Doha are lurching to a close with key issues unresolved. There are outstanding disputes on finance, compensation for climate change damages and allocations of carbon permits – so-called hot air. Developing countries are furious at what they say is a lack of ambition among richer countries to tackle climate change. And…
Last year, astronomers discovered a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy that erupted after shredding and consuming a passing star. Now researchers have identified a distinctive X-ray signal observed in the days following the outburst that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole. This tell-tale signal, called a quasi-periodic…
Astronomers have spotted a new component of the Milky Way galaxy’s skeleton — a “bone” of dust and gas that contains about as much material as 100,000 suns. The newfound Milky Way bone is more than 300 light-years long but just 1 or 2 light-years wide, giving it the appearance of a slender cosmic snake,…