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I do not take a decisive position on the extent to which taxonomic groups are related by descent. As such, my current position is one of skeptical agnosticism. While I view neo-Darwinian evolution as devoid of scientific traction, I think that common descent is still — at the very least — defensible, and on this issue I am quite happy to be persuaded one way or the other. Now, there is no doubt that universal common ancestry faces a lot of problems: such as the widely divergent early vertebrate embryonic stages and the non-congruence between homology and developmental pathways. But there are also some meritorious arguments for more modest levels of common ancestry — such as at the primate level. Read More ›

A rather comprehensive study of the European vole has concluded that it is hard to know how “fit” genes gain predominance in a population because of what they term “sexual antagonism.” It turns out that when dominant males mate with females, the females that pass on the dominant gene have smaller litter sizes, while the females not passing on the dominant gene have larger litter size. Here’s what one of the authors had to say: “With sexual antagonism such as this, it’s sometimes hard to understand how different genes are maintained in the reproductive process, because if the beneficial effect is much stronger in one sex, one would assume that only the gene with best overall success should be maintained,” Read More ›