Evolution

Tracking Evolution's Footprint Through The Human Genome

While fossils may provide some tantalizing clues about human history, they also lack vital information needed to understand the past, such as which pieces of human DNA have been favored by evolution because they confer beneficial traits. Those genetic sign ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 7 2010 - 7:42pm

'Metabolism First' Doesn't Explain Life's Origins

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers is challenging the theory that the origin of life stems from a system of self-catalytic molecules capable of experiencing Darwinian evolution without the need of RNA or D ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 8 2010 - 11:46am

Evolutionary Psychology – The Good, The Bad Or The Ugly?

As a young woman from France working as a civil servant in Liverpool in 1999, I once stumbled upon a book in a discount book shop, which was going to change the way I would look upon things. The book was called “ Baby Wars: The Dynamics of Family Conflict ...

Article - Emmanuelle Savigny - Jan 9 2010 - 9:56am

Ongoing Evolution May Explain Rise In Autoimmune Diseases, Reproductive Cancers

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say the subtle but ongoing pressures of human evolution could explain the seeming rise of disorders such as autism, autoimmune diseases, and reproductive cancers. They suggest that ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 11 2010 - 1:00pm

Blame Lousy Airport Security On Evolution

While people typically blame incompetency when airport security screeners fail to keep dangerous weapons off airplanes or when doctors miss developing cancer tumors, the real culprit may be evolution, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School. The ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 14 2010 - 3:03pm

Alligators' Bird-Like Respiration Sheds Like On Reptile Evolution

 Air flows in one direction as it loops through the lungs of alligators, just as it does in birds, and this breathing method may have helped the dinosaurs' ancestors dominate Earth after the planet's worst mass extinction 251 million years ago, a ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2010 - 7:01pm

Bacterial species concepts (my own work)

As described in my profile, I don't want to blog about my own field of research. However, in anticipation of questions about my research, I'm going to write this introductory post. So far, all my published work addresses how species concepts appl ...

Blog Post - Adam Retchless - Jan 28 2010 - 7:05pm

New Theory Shakes Up Primate Evolution

A new paper published in Zoologica Scripta argues that the distributions of the major primate groups are correlated with Mesozoic tectonic features and that their respective ranges are congruent with each evolving locally from a widespread ancestor on Pang ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 19 2010 - 4:06pm

Survival Of The...Cutest? Why Domestic Dogs Prove Evolution

According to a new study in the American Naturalist that compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, domestic dogs have followed their own evolutionary path, twisting Darwin's directive " ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2010 - 11:57am

Scientists And Creationists Called To Jury Duty

In my library at home, I have three books that catch the eye because of their unusual heft. One is my old copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and another is Stephen J. Gould’s massive treatise on evolution. Now, a third tome has made it a trio ...

Article - Dave Deamer - Jan 31 2010 - 10:31am