If you are in need of animated and grandiose debate, with a good measure of personal attacks thrown in, you are sure to find it in biology writing for a general audience. The latest is an outcome of Olivia Judson’s (biologist and author) resurrection of the “hopeful monster” idea with suitable provocative content to trigger a heated response from Jerry Coyne (major domo in the field). Judson suggests that we can revisit the idea of the “hopeful monster” (that a variation in a single gene can have a sudden and large morphological effect on the evolutionary development of an organism/species). Coyne will have none of it and offers some criticism, along with a fair amount of name dropping and attacks on personalities, an approach that we all now recognise as the “scientific method” ;-). Both articles/posts are interesting and informative reads!