How do new species arise? This question is still being vigorously researched in evolutionary biology. New technologies, such as genomics, provide intriguing new opportunities to investigate the matter, but they also show that some of the previous ideas were not as satisfactory as once thought. So, where does the research go from here?

The members of the Marie Curie SPECIATION Network have recently published a list of what they perceive to be key questions on the topic of speciation, as a guide for future studies. These questions were divided into three main research areas:

The evolution of the human brain is the topic of a lot of research. This shouldn’t be surprising since it is so well-developed in human beings, and, as many believe, it is one of the main traits that sets us apart from our close evolutionary relatives. The seat of consciousness, culture, science, technology, and so on, exerts a great desire upon people to understand it, and to understand how it could have evolved. In order to study this question, a new study, published in PLoS Biology, investigated the occurrence and activity of evolutionary young genes in human brain development.

The researchers, from the University of Chicago, grouped their findings into four lines of evidence:

A particular kind of sugar molecule had a big impact on human evolution and may have directed the evolutionary emergence of our ancestors, according to a new study in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the first evidence of a link between cell surface sugars, Darwinian sexual selection, and immune function in the context of human origins

Cooperation has been/still is a major factor in the success of the human species, and in many others as well. Altruism and fairness are thought to play an important role in the development of cooperation. But when in a human life do these traits develop? For quite some time, it was thought that they developed fairly late in ontogeny.

Lately, however, there has been some incipient research into the moral and prosocial behaviors of young children. A new study investigated the sense of fairness and tendency to be altruistic in 15-month-old infants.

Males of many species guard the females they have mated with, a behavior generally interpreted as a tactic to reduce the likelihood that rival males will mate with the female. This, of course, can lead to a conflict between the sexes: where females might want to mate with other males, males will try to prevent this. In this case, the male-female association is based on conflict.

A new study on crickets (Gryllus campestris, see figure 1), however, suggests that the foundation of the couple’s association might be based on cooperation. By continuously monitoring natural cricket populations with marked individuals, the researchers were able to observe behaviors and predation.