Evolution

Blooming Botany (1B)

Botany: A Blooming History And now we return to part one of this series ...

Article - Robert H Olley - Jul 5 2011 - 6:14pm

Sex And Parasites

Sex is costly. Yet it is widespread throughout the animal kingdom, so there must be some advantages to it. And still, it seems easier to list disadvantages. Sexual reproduction is complicated, requires more time and uses more energy than its asexual count ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 13 2011 - 4:04pm

Why Cheetahs Never Prosper (or, The Genetic Bottleneck Problem)

Between Easter’s religious reminders and a molecular evolution class overdose of population genetics, I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up yesterday from an unsettling dream about taking my midterm exam on Noah’s Ark. The ocean was rising, Noah was ...

Article - Holly Moeller - Jul 17 2011 - 9:50pm

Evolution and Wealth

Greetings, I came across this plot, and decided to post it here. Figure: Plot that shows the correlation between the percentage of the public the accepts evolution and the GDP per capita. (Source: Calamities of Nature) So, what can we learn from this plot? ...

Blog Post - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 18 2011 - 5:26am

Evolution: Human Walking Began 1.8 Million Years Earlier Than Previously Thought

Human-like features of the feet and gait were in existence almost two million years earlier than previously thought, according to recent analysis of ancient footprints in Laetoli, Tanzania. Earlier studies suggested that the characteristics of the human fo ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 20 2011 - 12:47am

Should Evolutionary Psychology Evolve?

Evolutionary psychology is a field that examines human psychological traits through evolutionary glasses. Most human psychological traits are considered adaptations, the functional products of natural or sexual selection. This is tidily summarized in a qu ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 22 2011 - 7:28am

Theology of Molluscs?

Molluscs are Marvellous! — as regular readers of “Squid-a-Day” will know. The recent presentation there of  Celebrate Squid Babies  brought to mind the following, from Darwin’s notebooks: How far grander than idea from cramped imagination … that since the ...

Blog Post - Robert H Olley - Jul 23 2011 - 9:12am

Welcome To Humans, Version 3.0

Where are we humans going, as a species? If science fiction is any guide, we will genetically evolve like in X-Men, become genetically engineered as in Gattaca, or become cybernetically enhanced like General Grievous in Star Wars. All of these may well be ...

Article - Mark Changizi - Aug 2 2011 - 12:24pm

Females Can Limit Male Trait Complexity

Anisogamy (see figure 1), or sexual reproduction in which two different gametes fuse to produce a new individual, leads to an inequality between female and male organisms. After all, females produce a limited supply of costly egg cells, while males produc ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Aug 9 2011 - 2:58am

Wasp Altruism Or How We Can Fit Anything To Pet Theories

Can we stop the crap about "selfishness" and "altruism" when discussing animal behavior?  It's absolutely ridiculous the unnatural gyrations researchers go through to try and reconcile behaviors that clearly don't fit the prev ...

Blog Post - Gerhard Adam - Aug 13 2011 - 11:29pm