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Recently a friend, sceptical of my non-scientist interest in science, asked ‘What of culture’? To answer I have to set down my current opinions on both culture and beliefs. The real god is the forces of Nature that have dictated the development of the Universe and the history of planet Earth. Traditional religions are the […]

Following the death of my sister on 15th November 2008 – see Doris Clarke, A Life in Publications – I had a commemorative bench installed on a grassy area near the village pond (like the one above), this along with two other people whose relatives had recently died. Greta, my half-sister, had died one month earlier

The final ‘evolution’ based blog for now. Homo sapiens is a real ‘new kid on the block’ in evolutionary timescale. Homo sapiens (a term first coined by Carl Linnaeus, spg, well ahead of Darwin’s research and his Origin of the Species, homo defined as Man and sapiens as wise) is the only surviving member of a

The ebb-and-flow of the Ice Ages and Interglacial periods over the past two+ million years has resulted in some species extinction as the climate change was too rapid for natural speciation to take place. Woolly mammoths are a well-known example. Are we living in a current mass extinction era? Despite the efforts of global organisations

Apologies for temporary lapse – continuing, but broadening, the swift theme. From the evidence of fossil remains studied it seems that the modern breeds of swift have evolved from similar ancestors which survived, or benefitted from, the ‘Eocene-Oligocene extinction event’ some 30 million years ago. The history of the evolution of life-forms on Earth has been impacted

The little bit of thought I gave to the blogs on Swallows and swifts led me to think about the broad issue of taxonomy. Taxonomy is the science of classification, a thing which can be applied to any activity but which is often interpreted as the scheme(s) of classification of organic  life-forms – plants and