thinkevolution.net

Cogito.org is a online resource for kids interested in science. It’s run by the Johns Hopkins CTY people, and provides current information about science and technology—like global warming, robotics and evolution—but it also features stories about kids making science news and links to summer camps and academic competitions. One of the neatest things about Cogito is that it also hosts online forums where students can chat with each other and with limited-engagement guest experts. Well, guess who was a recent guest expert!

I spent a week answering questions and promoting discussion about evolution in the Cogito forums (members only). The students had some great questions, including something about an economics theory that required a quick detour through Wikipedia. The interview has now been published on the main Cogito site and can be read here.

Check out the newest installment of the Tangled Bank over at The Voltage Gate!

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.

–Charles Darwin

The latest installation of the Tangled Bank is up on Greg Laden’s blog, right here!