Evolution

Late Equals Large? A New Look At Brain Evolution

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have successfully altered the brain of one type of Cichlid fish to resemble that of another and discovered differences in the general patterning of the brain before neurogenesis occurs. The findings, publis ...

Article - News Staff - May 3 2010 - 6:31pm

Neanderthals And Humans Interbred, DNA Evidence Suggests

After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. The effort revealed evidence that shortly after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them inter ...

Article - News Staff - May 6 2010 - 4:10pm

How Many Limbs Should Humans Have?

In War of the Worlds, giant alien robots emerge out of the ground and begin vaporizing large numbers of actors. There’s a lot to like in those scenes, but there are three things I could not stand. Like those three legs they walked around on.   Not their f ...

Article - Mark Changizi - May 10 2010 - 12:54pm

Predation Or Competition: Which Is More Important To Evolution?

Biologists studying a population of lizards on the Bahamas say that competition among the brown anole lizard (Anolis sagrei) is more important than predation by birds and snakes when it comes to survival of the fittest lizard. The Dartmouth team's res ...

Article - News Staff - May 10 2010 - 11:50am

Could We Actually Combine Our Genetic Material With Na’vi And Create Avatars?

Sometimes I feel like there is a hook in my chest. It rips me from my current location and pulls me through time and space to places deep within my imagination. The sensation is physical and real, and always from my heart and lungs, not my head. Looking ou ...

Article - Lauren Chircus - May 11 2010 - 5:34pm

Universal Common Ancestry Passes Quantitative Test

Since Darwin proposed universal common ancestry (UCA) More than 150 years ago, the theory, though well supported, has remained beyond the scope of formal testing. But the author of a new letter in Nature says that the famous theory that underpins modern ev ...

Article - News Staff - May 12 2010 - 1:22pm

Unstable Chromosome Regions Make Brewing Possible

Yeast cells' ability to convert sugar into alcohol, essential for the production of beer and wine, can be attributed to a series of gene duplications that allow for optimal conversion of different types of sugars (such as sucrose and maltose) into alc ...

Article - News Staff - May 14 2010 - 10:41am

Why Do We Have Ten Fingers?

In How Many Limbs Should Humans Have? I described my Limb Law, an empirical law I discovered which relates how long an animal’s limbs are to how many limbs it has. This law is explained by virtue of animals having evolved a limb design that minimizes the a ...

Article - Mark Changizi - May 17 2010 - 3:19pm

Prehistoric Fish Extinction Hit Reset Button On Vertebrate Evolution

A mass extinction of fish 360 million years ago hit the reset button on life, setting the stage for modern vertebrate biodiversity, say researchers writing in PNAS. The mass extinction scrambled the species pool near the time at which the first vertebrates ...

Article - News Staff - May 17 2010 - 5:40pm

Selfish Genes And Genic Selection

My recent article The Origins of Virtue sparked a discussion in which Josh Witten has assumed that Gerhard Adam and I are confused as to the subject of genic selection. The confusion lies entirely with Josh, but the matter deserves clarification for reader ...

Article - Steve Davis - May 19 2010 - 12:07am