Chosen topics

What is this topic of which we speak? Since choosing a topic to investigate each week is an important part of the assessment for this class I thought I'd post some suggestions from the first few classes.

In no particular order here are ten topics that come to mind (this is by no means a comprehensive list):

• Giraffe neck evolution. What is the full story?
• Have recent advances in epigenetics provided a mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics proposed by Lamark (see next blog post above).
• Whatever happened to that Big Bird chicken?
  
• Tiktaalik - the 'fishopod'. Is it a 'missing link'? What do we mean by that? Is there a better term?
  
• When we directly compare the DNA between species how do we do this given that there is variation within a species?
  
• How old do we now think the earth is? How do we know this? Could we be wrong?
  
• What is the likelihood we will find evidence of an alternate origin of life? Has anyone claimed we already have?
• How do you go about looking for 'weird life'?
  
• What IS life? Any interesting recent musings on this topic. If you really want to go there?
  
• Virophages. The virus parasite I briefly mentioned.