Evolution

Bt Cotton And The Evolution Of Resistance

Over the last decade, genetically modified crops have become widespread in agriculture. One of the more successful of these are Bt crops- transgenic plants that express genes derived from Bacillus thuringensis. These genes allow the plants to produce toxi ...

Article - Ian Ramjohn - Feb 23 2008 - 8:19pm

Study: Darwin Got One Thing Wrong- The Origin Of The Domestic Chicken

Charles Darwin maintained that the domesticated chicken derives from the red jungle fowl, but new research from Uppsala University now shows that the wild origins of the chicken are more complicated than that. The researchers mapped the genes that give mos ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 29 2008 - 10:14am

Transfer RNA- Evolution's Historian

Transfer RNA is an ancient molecule, central to every task a cell performs and thus essential to all life. A new study from the University of Illinois indicates that it is also a great historian, preserving some of the earliest and most profound events of ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 7 2008 - 10:27pm

How Science Really Works

The news keeps coming in, and examples of how real science works (as opposed to make believe creationism or so-called intelligent design) are beginning to get so numerous that it is hard to imagine people capable of reading newspaper articles are still cap ...

Article - Massimo Pigliucci - Mar 14 2008 - 12:53am

Are Bacteriophages Picky Eaters?

I don't often see bacteriophage ecology and evolution papers in the open source literature, but there is a nice one in next month's American Naturalist (occasionally Am Nat selects papers for open access). ...

Article - John Dennehy - Mar 15 2008 - 1:45pm

Increased Complexity: Is This The First Rule Of Evolution?

Writing in PNAS, a group of researchers says they have determined the first pervasive 'rule' of evolution- that animals become increasingly more complex. Examining the last 550 million years of the fossil catalog, the team investigated the differ ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 17 2008 - 4:39pm

Can you be a biologist and not believe in Evolution?

Nathaniel Abraham got a job as a biology post-doc at Woods Hole and then chose to disclose that he wasn't necessarily hip to every little aspect of evolutionary biology- like the whole evolution part. You all know me pretty well. I am middle of the ro ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Jun 7 2013 - 9:41am

No 'Cost Of Complexity' In Evolution, Says Study

Higher organisms do not have a “cost of complexity” — or slowdown in the evolution of complex traits — according to a report by researchers at Yale and Washington University in Nature. Biologists have long puzzled over the relationship between evolution of ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 1 2008 - 1:22am

Nature Experiment Shows Adaptation Speeds Up Speciation

In the first experiment of its kind conducted in nature, a University of British Columbia evolutionary biologist has come up with strong evidence for one of Charles Darwin’s cornerstone ideas – adaptation to the environment accelerates the creation of new ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 1 2008 - 8:23pm

Genetic Fingerprints- Splicing Exerts Selective Pressure On DNA Sequence

The Human Genome Project revealed that only a small fraction of the 3 billion “letter” DNA code actually instructs cells to manufacture proteins, the workhorses of most life processes. This has raised the question of what the remaining part of the human ge ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 8 2008 - 3:35pm