No stranger to controversy, the word "evolution" was the star of a recently published paper by researchers from the Biology Department of the University of VA, Charlottesville. Their paper , Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word , takes the reader through a study of the terminology used by evolutionary biologists and medical researchers to describe the "evolutionary" process that leads to antimicrobial resistance . The researchers found that in evolutionary journals the word "evolution" was used to describe the process 65.8% of the time compared to 2.7% of the time in medical journals, which preferred terms such as emerging, increasing, and spreading. The paper goes on to show that the use or non-use of the word evolution in a scientific paper is a good predictor of whether the word evolution is used in the paper's media coverage. The researchers conclude, "Like gravity, evolution is an everyday process th
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