Episode 41
Darwin's Bulldog
On June 30, 1860 a great debate took place at the Oxford University Museum. This debate helped to launch Thomas Huxley’s career as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog”....
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Explore 161 episodes covering the who, what, why, and how of evolution
Episode 40
Neanderthalis Extinctus
In the last episode we came face to face with the Neanderthal. What happened to the Neanderthal? Did they die on the battlefield or did they live out ...
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The Neanderthal
In the Neander valley, limestone miners found something which shocked them. They had found bones which they first thought belonged to a bear. Once Pro...
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Genetic Drift
Frog populations remained pretty much the same in Podville until the Great Fire of 2015. After the fire the population of blue frogs increased. Welcom...
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Non-Overlapping Magisteria
In 1997 Professor Stephen Jay Gould published an essay in Natural History which also appeared in his book Rocks of Ages. This essay was titled ‘Non-Ov...
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Altruism
Where does altruism come from? How did it evolve in a world ruled by ‘selfish genes’? Evolution Talk is also a book! You can find links to Amazon, Ba...
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Survival of the Fittest?
The term ‘Survival of the Fittest’ was unleashed on the world in 1864 by Herbert Spencer when he published his work Principles of Biology. It was late...
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Putting the Selection in Sex
For Charles Darwin, the idea of sexual selection explained a lot of what he saw in the animal kingdom. He gave sexual selection just as much importanc...
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Warm Blooded Dinosaurs
In 1986 Professor Robert Bakker, a paleontologist, published ‘The Dinosaur Heresies’. According to Professor Bakker there have been waves of extinctio...
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Where Are the Dinosaurs?
What killed off the dinosaurs? There are many competing theories yet there is no ‘smoking gun’. There is evidence however, and with each bit of eviden...
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A Whale of a Tale
Today’s episode of Evolution Talk is brought to you by all of those animals out there who exhibit vestigial features (which is pretty much every anima...
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An Interview With Charles Darwin
Rick Coste steps into the past to interview Charles Darwin. Evolution Talk is also a book! You can find links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others on...
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Mistakes Were Made
In the X-Men movies the X-Men are mutants. Mistakes were made during DNA replications that brought out features and abilities which were not present i...
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Is Everything Related?
The Human genome project took 13 years to complete. Hundreds of scientists from all over the world were involved. What’s just as amazing as the comple...
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Fossil Dating
How do we date fossils? There are a few ways and in this episode we will look at a couple. Evolution Talk is also a book! You can find links to Amazo...
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Robert Chambers
Robert Chambers’ masterpiece was titled ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’. In it he explained how everything evolved. Everything from simp...
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The Case of Patrick Matthew
Patrick Matthew published ‘On Naval Timber and Arboriculture’ in 1831. There were a few positive reviews but they were somewhat tepid in their praise....
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The Work of WC Wells
William Charles Wells, in no uncertain terms, pointed out that mankind is not immune to nature’s ability to modify an organism’s features over time. ...
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Unlucky Lamarck
Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s mechanism for evolution was wrong, as history shows, and that fact has haunted his memory ever since. But ideas and theories h...
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Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus was a country physician. He believed that women should have access to the same education that men did, and that slavery should be abolished. H...
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