The post before this one was UD’s 9,000th.  Thank you to all of our readers for your support as we celebrate this milestone.

The phenomenon of convergence has been recognised in external morphology (e.g. the streamlined shape of sharks and porpoises), structural detail (e.g. the camera-like construction of the vertebrate eye and the octopus eye), and in many other functional aspects of organisms (e.g. the echolocation systems used by bats and whales). In textbooks and popular science writing, convergence is often explained in a Darwinian way, invoking the amazing powers of natural selection. However, far from being a curiosity that pops up from time to time, convergence appears to be a pervasive feature of the living world. Championing this perspective is Professor Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeontologist from Cambridge University, who is actively contributing to debate and constructing an online database of Read More ›

Yesterday, Dr Cornelius Hunter headlined (full story here) how a Washington, DC-based, bipartisan Governor- and Captains of Industry- led Next Generation Science Standards initiative is pushing for an evolutionary materialism-loaded programme of science standards. The standards are intended to be accepted and adopted “in whole, without alteration.” A clear warning sign in an age of ever so many agendas being pushed on us as “solutions” to real or imaginary crises A to Z. The warning flag is tripped for good reason. For, a s CH documents, the proposed standards include: Anatomical similarities and differences between various organisms living today, and between them and organisms in the fossil record, enable the reconstruction of evolutionary history and the inference of lines of Read More ›