Articles tagged with "species"

I was excited to read about a bit of a home-grown science breakthrough this month. An artificial egg made of a silicone membrane lattice has been used to hatch 26 chickens.

I would like to make some general observations, and then review a recently published book which synthesises most of what Ben Reid (MEMIA) called a “polycrisis” in his book I previously reviewed.

In my time I've heard a few arguments against use of the poison, and there doesn't seem to be any new claims this time round. The kind of arguments I've seen in the media are that it:

On a recent visit to New Plymouth I was rather taken aback to see a billboard outside a central city church posing the question: "Evolution? How come we still have apes?" It wasn't so much surprise that someone could know so little about evolutionary theory that they would think this was a persuasive argument - versions of this are often to be seen in the less sophisticated creationist publications - it was more that they should feel the urge to display their ignorance on a busy street corner.

All life has a common ancestor. Or to put it another way, every creature alive today, including ourselves, has an unbroken chain of ancestors going back almost four billion years. At certain points along the path from then to now, lineages have split, and split again, to give rise to the millions of species alive today.

I've just witnessed a miracle. Probably. On January 2 I took part in a trip to the outer Hauraki Gulf to search for a bird that until recently had not been seen since the nineteenth century. Three specimens of the bird, the New Zealand Storm Petrel, sitting in museums in Paris and London, were believed to be the only representatives of yet another of this country's extinct species.