WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW:

All Blue Eyed People Related to Brad Pitt (Andrew Curry, 1/31/08, Der Spiegel)

According to a new paper by a Danish researcher, blue eyes come as the result of a single mutation that occurred 10,000 years ago. Which means that all people with blue peepers have a common ancestor. [...]

The paper, published Thursday by Danish geneticist Hans Eiberg in the journal Human Genetics, links all baby blues to a single mutation that occurred 10,000 years ago.

Adaptive Plasticity in Female Mate Choice Dampens Sexual Selection on Male Ornaments in the Lark Bunting (Alexis S. Chaine and Bruce E. Lyon, Science)

Theory on the evolution of ornamental male traits by sexual selection assumes consistency in selection over time. Temporal variation in female choice could dampen sexual selection, but scant information exists on the degree to which individual female preferences are flexible. Here we show that in lark buntings sexual selection on male traits varied dramatically across years and, in some cases, exhibited reversals in the direction of selection for a single trait. We show that these shifts are probably because of flexibility in mate choice by individual females...

There's no such thing as natural selection, just aesthetics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 31, 2008 2:20 PM