Before I was a biologist, I spent a long time in the retail automobile parts business. It was scary to give up a good job to go back to school, but it would have been scarier to spend the rest of my life selling car parts.

Birds (chickadees for example) have the ability to grow entire new neurons. Most other vertebrates have no ability to do this. Think about this the next time you call someone a birdbrain.

With birds and bats, the only real parallel is the fact that they've both built an airfoil out of a forelimb. The structure of the wings is very different with respect to the pattern of bones, and the actual make-up of the airfoil surface (skin vs. feathers). Of course there were true flying reptiles previously; the fact that there are none today is just bad luck on their part.

White-nose has caused huge decreases in the number of bats in the northeast. I have a friend who visited a maternity cave in Vermont where there were thousands of bats last year, and this year found less than two dozen. My guess is that we're not on the edge of a mass extinction of bats, for a number of reasons: researchers are working to find a response, the fungus may not spread beyond the Northeast (fingers crossed), and most bat species have a fairly wide distribution, and there's a chance that some immunity to the fungus will arise in bat populations, which have the abilty to rebound fairly quickly. That's all guesswork on my part.

I find most areas of evolutionary theory pretty interesting. The big debate right now (at least in the stuff I'm reading) is gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, but to my way of thinking that's being quickly settled in favor of the latter. There's lots of cutting edge work being done, but not so much "debate" except around the edges of the theory. I should point out here that there are many facets of evolutionary theory that I know very little about; I have no knowledge about potential subjects of debate in those areas.

I expect very little in the way of "new" life forms as a result of human actions. Human activity tends to be destructive and quick; it will surely change the other organisms with which we interact, but totally new life forms generally require more time to arise than we probably have left, if present trends continue. We're much more likely to wipe out huge swaths of biodiversity, which will eventually result in new organisms--we just probably won't be around to see the fruits of our labors.

Humans are certainly evolving. Evolution is an inevitable part of life; it's part of the definition of what makes a thing alive. How are we changing? It's difficult to know. Some things are clear: sexual maturity is coming earlier, our "average" quality of eyesight is getting worse, deleterious recessive traits that were once weeded out of the population are now survivable (this is a good thing for us). Predicting the effects of future evolutionary change is like trying to predict the lottery.

I'm afraid I'm too ignorant of cricket to make any sort of comment about it. I love baseball because it's a perfectly evolved combination of athletic ability, strategy, and dumb luck. Also, it has beer.