The 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species is coming up next week, and even the creationists are celebrating. In fact one of them is giving out free copies of Darwin's seminal book. The catch? It comes with a confused, incoherent creationist rant as the introduction.

The creationist is Ray Comfort, who has decided to distribute copies of the Origin to "100 top U.S. universities," which apparently includes Washington University here in St. Louis. because Comforts foot soldiers were out in force, handing out books to students at the campus metro train station.

No fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants.

- Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle



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Sunday Science Book Club

The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin

In a review of Gladwell's new book:

How should we talk about biological networks or systems? Roger Brent and Jehoshua Bruck stated the problem like this:

I have to delay the Sunday Science Book Club and my discussion of Voyage of the Beagle until next week. In the mean time, I'm initiating the first Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Corner. Over the next few months, I'll share my experiences as I work through my list of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, one of my favorite fiction genres.

Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Corner
Far North, by Marcel Theroux
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2009

This is a little old, but Thomas Mailund, who writes on of my favorite blogs, has posted a video interview with Svante Pääbo, the scientist leading the neanderthal genome project. At one point Pääbo addresses the question everyone's asking: did humans and neanderthals have sex? Pääbo says of course they did (why wouldn't they during the 10,000+ years they lived together), but the question is whether they produced hybrid offspring. He hopes to answer the latter question with the neanderthal genome sequence.

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Welcome to the 17th edition of the Carnival of Evolution. This month, we celebrate not only great evolution blogging around the web, but also some of the best evolution writing of all time. 150 years ago, in November of 1859, The Origin of Species was published. For our sesquicentennial celebration of this major turning point in the history of biology, I've taken a virtual voyage on the Beagle through the vast expanse of the blogosphere. And like Darwin on that first trip in the Beagle, I've kept a journal of my observations, with a little posthumous help from Charles.

From a news story in today's issue of Science:

A new study finds little evidence for leaks in the U.S. pipeline for producing native-born scientists except for a steep drop in the percentage of the highest performing students taking science and engineering jobs. The findings suggest that the United States risks losing its economic competitiveness not because of a work force inadequately trained in science, as conventional wisdom holds, but because of a lack of social and economic incentives to pursue careers in science and technology.

Harvard Magazine excerpts Louis Menand on "Professionalization in the academy. If you're thinking of going to graduate school, you need to read this.

This is the premise behind academic scholarship: