As geeky as this may sound, it turns out that the problems inherent in making robot fish yield some of humanity's deepest questions: How did we get here? What (and where) is thought? How much can we trust the symbols (words, images, digital signals) that dominate our lives? Long's new book, "Darwin's Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology," is part Descartes, part MacGyver and part Douglas Adams, turning from rumination on the possibility of intelligence residing in a brainless body to tips on making artificial fish vertebrae out of coffee stirrers to the dopey yet endearing jokes that seem to flourish in laboratories all over the world.

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We watched through the video, and decided -- in the keeping with the pageant theme -- to hand out awards.

Winner: Lauren Carter, Miss Vermont, who said:

I think evolution should be taught in schools, because not everybody has the same religious backgrounds, and it's important to have scientific facts about the world. We do know that evolution exists even on the small scale, like ... bacteria that are becoming resistant to drugs and what not, so [we] might as well learn about it.

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The report, called "Male-Female Coevolution in the Wild: Evidence from a Time Series in Artemia Franciscana," found that the female brine shrimp "survived better and had longer interbrood intervals when mated with their contemporary males compared to when mated with males from the future or the past." Its formal conclusion: "[T]he process of male-female coevolution, previously revealed by experimental evolution in laboratory artificial conditions, can occur in nature on a short evolutionary time scale."

How is it possible for females of a species to breed with males from past or future generations? For brine shrimp, it's actually easier than you might think. Science writer Carl Zimmer explains:

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So why hedge? Well, someday -- maybe someday soon -- he may want the support of Kansas Republicans. And sometimes, successful Republican politicians begin debasing themselves to win the votes of far-right rubes well before they begin forming exploratory committees.

Here are some signs that your formerly rational Republican governor (or former governor, or mayor, or representative) might be planning a presidential run:

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Yes, evolution. Being open to possibility of allegory. And in the 21st century, no less! Now, in some parts of the world, a candidate's response to such scurrilous attacks might be something along the lines of, "Screw you, mouth breathers." Instead, Byrne has gone on the defensive, stating that his remarks at a Piggly Wiggly appearance last November ("I believe there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be literally true and parts that are not") were taken out of context. On his website he's quick to insist, "I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true" and that, "As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school text books."

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The fossils bear traits from both lineages, and researchers have named them Australopithecus sediba, meaning "southern ape, wellspring," to indicate their relation to earlier apelike forms and to features later found in more modern people.

"These fossils give us an extraordinarily detailed look into a new chapter of human evolution and provide a window into a critical period when hominids made the committed change from dependency on life in the trees to life on the ground," said Lee R. Berger of South Africa's University of Witwatersrand. "Australopithecus sediba appears to present a mosaic of features demonstrating an animal comfortable in both worlds."

Berger and colleagues describe the find in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Modern humans, known as Homo sapiens, descended over millions of years from earlier groups, such as Australopithecus, the best-known example of which may be the fossil Lucy, who lived about a million years before the newly discovered A. sediba.

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But unlike most of these attacks, "What Darwin Got Wrong," a new book by Jerry Fodor, a professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona, comes not from the religious right, but from two atheist academics with -- surprise -- a nuanced argument about the shortcomings of Darwin’s theories. Their book details (in very technical language) how recent discoveries in genetics have thrown into question many of our perceived truths about natural selection, and why these have the potential to undermine much of what we know about evolution and biology.

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Was this stunt shrewd or moronic? From the first it's been hard to tell. The plan, innocuously named "Origin Into Schools," was announced this September in a video featuring Kirk Cameron, a former television child star who co-founded a ministry called Living Waters with Comfort. There's something almost pitiable about the way Cameron crows over the scheme; he truly seems to find it ingenious. He points out that the University of California at Berkeley cannot prevent the action because "their own Web site" dictates that "anyone is free to distribute noncommercial materials in any outdoor area of the campus." "Besides," he gleefully adds, "what are they really going to do? Ban 'The Origin of Species'? That would be big news! Especially when their own bookstore sells it for $29.99!"

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(But first, a little blogosphere archeology. I was alerted to the story by a link from Mark Thoma to a Discover Magazine blog post titled "Will the Super-Rich Evolve Into a Different Species?" But Discovery attributed Saffo's comments to reporting by The Guardian while linking instead to a Telegraph story titled "Rich May 'Evolve Into a Different Species.'" The Telegraph, meanwhile, reported that Saffo's comments were made to the Sunday Times, whose story had the less sensationalist title "What's Your Place in the Brave New World?" And after following this trail, the quote marks that the Telegraph placed around "evolve into a different species" seem a trifle suspect, because it's the Times writer, Dominic Rushe, who uses the word, not Saffo.)

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Celebrations and exhibitions commemorating “Origin’s" publication are gearing up across the world, but Cameron and his God squad are not going to sit around quietly while monkey ancestry gets peddled to America’s youth. On Nov. 21, they’re handing "the truth" straight to them -- in the form of 50,000 free copies of Darwin’s book, amended with a 50-page introduction refuting the whole megillah, at the top 50 college campuses across the country. Watch the promotional clip for the "Origin Into Schools" campaign here:

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Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, began his career studying chimpanzees alongside Jane Goodall, and rose to academic acclaim as a primatologist specializing in the roots of male aggression. Naturally, he tends to think of most scientific questions in relation to chimps. And so it was that a few years ago, while sitting in front of his fireplace preparing a lecture on human evolution, he wondered, "What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?" The answer, he decided, was in front of him: fire to cook food.

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He is sitting in the middle of his room, slowly lifting cupped handfuls of air from the right side of him and then putting them down on his left, one by one, in very caring and deliberate measures, like a child in a sandbox. Every so often one or two handfuls will go up over his left shoulder, as though they contain something offensive in his mind or at least are not worthy of conserving, and then he resumes the careful side-piling again.

Whatever this may be about, I've no intention of interrupting it. He seems to be in such a deep trance, reliving and reveling in one of his fondest memories, for all I know, playing in the yard, perhaps, as a baby chimp with his life's one chimpanzee friend, Sally.

Maddening, at times, the proximity of so much unspoken meaning and motive. But I have learned to just take it. To remain in uncertainty and incomprehension without impatiently reaching for and imposing on Roger any motives or meanings of my own.

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Dan McLeroy, the Texas State Board of Education chairman, a dentist and self-described creationist, led the charge to mandate teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of the theory of evolution. After three days of high-pitched argument on both sides, the 15-member board, by a vote of 8-7, rejected the language, relieving textbook authors and publishers of the pressure to insert what opponents called "junk science" into their pages. But in a compromise that alarms and dismays many science education advocates, the board did adopt language that attempts to cast a shadow of doubt over the validity of the central evolutionary concepts of natural selection and common ancestry.

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When it comes to textbooks, Texas public schools are the equivalent of McDonald's or WalMart. Because they're such a big customer, textbook publishers figure it's just easier to follow Texas standards, even for books sold elsewhere in the U.S. So this vote could mean textbooks that would be teaching Texas' anti-evolution curriculum to students outside of the state.

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Obama is not the only public figure who seeks to identify his cause with America's most iconic president. Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, the Lincoln Memorial has been part of the iconography of the civil rights movement. For its part, the Republican Party, whose first elected president was Abraham Lincoln, claims to be "Mr. Lincoln's party." Free-market conservatives like to quote Lincoln's speech in New Haven, Conn., on March 6, 1860, to make him sound like a Wall Street Journal libertarian: "I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good." (Never mind that Lincoln said this to refute claims that his opposition to the ownership of slaves meant that Republicans wanted a "war on capital.") Conversely, liberals can dig out nuggets that seem to support the cause of labor, like these words from Lincoln's Annual Message to Congress in 1861: "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital." (Never mind that this is a reference to Locke's labor theory of value, not to collective bargaining). Log Cabin Republicans claim that because Lincoln supported black rights he would have supported gay rights, while Straussian conservatives claim that because he supported black rights he would support a federal ban on abortion.

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Currently, Myers is under fire from his university and an army of righteous Catholics over his self-proclaimed "Great Desecration" caper. On July 24, he pierced a Communion wafer with a rusty nail ("I hope Jesus' tetanus shots are up to date," he quipped) and threw it in the trash with coffee grounds and a banana peel. The nail also cut through pages of the Quran and Dawkins' "The God Delusion." He featured a photo of the "desecration" on his blog, and wrote, "Nothing must be held sacred. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet."

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Carse, who's retired from New York University (where he directed the Religious Studies Program for 30 years), is out to rescue religion from both religious fundamentalists and atheists. He worries that today's religious zealots have dragged us into a Second Age of Faith, not unlike the medieval Crusaders. But he's also critical of the new crop of atheists. "What these critics are attacking is not religion, but a hasty caricature of it," he writes in his new book, "The Religious Case Against Belief."

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In his new book, "Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution," Karl Giberson calls this a false choice. A professor of physics at Eastern Nazarene College, and director of the Forum on Faith and Science at Gordon College, Giberson believes in evolutionary theory as adamantly as he does in God. For Giberson, evolution and Christianity are not in competition but complement one another. Holding equal disdain for creationists who read the Bible literally and scientists who disregard God altogether, Giberson seeks a middle way, and attempts to resuscitate Darwin's reputation as both a religious man and a scientist. In conversation, Giberson possesses a boundless inquisitiveness typical of many scientists, but also displays the wry wit of a seasoned polemicist. He seems to know how to counteract your best arguments before you have even made them.

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