From Jasmin Fox Skelly at New Scientist: A 520-million-year-old fossil shows an ancient shrimp-like creature caring for its four offspring. It is the oldest ever example of a parent actively looking after its young after they hatch. More. (paywall) The arthropod may be the ancestor of insects and spiders (or maybe not). We have one “snapshot” and that’s from billions of lives. What it mainly shows is that, contrary to what we might expect, there seems to have been little evolution of animal psychology since then. See also: The cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion of life 541 million years ago

Responding to animal behaviorist Kevin Laland’s recent piece at Aeon, Evolution unleashed: Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided? At Oscillations, Mazur writes, In the unconvincing Aeon article, “Evolution unleashed,” Laland asks the question: “If the extended evolutionary synthesis is not a call for a revolution in evolution, then what is it, and why do we need it? Good point. To answer Laland’s question—We don’t need it. We don’t need a graft onto Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. What we do need is a coherent evolutionary theory, untainted by mystical influences and non-transparent funding. An evolutionary theory that reflects the world of microbes and viruses that all animals, plants and fungi live in and Read More ›

Recently, one of our star commenters, Sandwalk’s Larry Moran, mooted that the Royal Society meeting on assessing where we are with evolution maybe should be cancelled. Then he said he doesn’t want it to be cancelled but “they may cancel the meeting because the IDiots and the kooks are gloating about destroying evolution.” We hadn’t heard much from people who are gloating about destroying evolution but we’ve heard plenty from people who can do without the Darwin lobby running the field into the ground. Some of the episodes we’ve noted are pretty crazy. The University of Kentucky had to settle with astronomer Martin Gaskell for $125,000 because one of his colleagues was obsessing with a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist about his possible support Read More ›

TPeeler brings this oldie but goody back to our attention: Darwin’s theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past. For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils – even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures – but none are credible ancestors to the Cambrian animals. Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin’s theory has been Read More ›

At the scandalous premiere of Privileged Planet at the Smithsonian Institution several years ago, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez said something to the effect “not only are we in the right place in the universe, we’re alive at the right time!” Dr. Gonzalez, normally unexpressive and soft spoken, was uncharacteristically emphatic about being alive at the right time in cosmic history, suggesting the window of arrival of homo sapiens and modern technology happened within an exceedingly narrow time frame. He was so emphatic that one would surmise he was seeing a miracle, as if whatever was the source of the universe specially ordained this time and place in the fabric of reality. From the prestigious scientific journal Nature: Caught in the Act Read More ›