Evolution

New Origin Of Life Hypothesis: Did Life Begin Between The (Mica) Sheets?

Life on Earth may have originated as the organic filling in a multilayer sandwich of mica sheets, according to Helen Hansma of the National Science Foundation and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a presentation at the American Society for Ce ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 5 2007 - 10:45am

Liquid Crystal Phases Of DNA Molecules Suggest New Scenario For First Life On Earth

A team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Milan has discovered some unexpected forms of liquid crystals of ultrashort DNA molecules immersed in water, providing a new scenario for a key step in the emergence of life on Earth ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 5 2007 - 11:12am

Genes In Conflict

"The conflict between maternal and fetus genes is one of the weirdest ideas in the modern theory of evolution."* According to evolutionary logic, the fetus "wants" to milk the mother for all it can get; the mother "wants" to ...

Article - John Dennehy - Dec 5 2007 - 3:19pm

Evolution Is Speeding Up, Says Researcher, And We're Becoming More Different

Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up – and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought – indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different. “We used a new genom ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 11 2007 - 2:41am

New Gene Loss Studies Show How They Contributed To Natural Selection

While it is well understood that the evolution of new genes leads to adaptations that help species survive, gene loss may also afford a selective advantage. A group of scientists has investigated this less-studied idea, carrying out the first systematic co ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 11 2007 - 9:54pm

Will Aaron Filler Revolutionize Human Evolution?

Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist Aaron Filler, MD, PhD, has posted a 25 minute video titled, "Hominiform Progression", which he says is a revolutionary direct video view into the evolution of movement among the hominiforms: the apes and hum ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 13 2007 - 2:03am

Humans In The Evolution Fast Lane

Countering a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a new study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 13 2007 - 9:25pm

Insect Study Questions Standard Eusociality Explanation

The January 2008 issue of BioScience includes an article by biologist Edward O. Wilson that argues for a new perspective on the evolution of advanced social organization in some ants, bees, and wasps (Hymenoptera). Wilson’s article surveys recent evidence ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 2 2008 - 3:41am

Is Most Of The Human Genome Functional?

I first became interested in genome size because of its tie-ins with important evolutionary questions in which I was (and still am) interested, such as punctuated vs. gradual patterns, levels of selection, and adaptive vs. non-adaptive processes. What I d ...

Article - T. Ryan Gregory - Jan 20 2008 - 4:04pm

Bacterial Genomes And Evolution

The seminar that I give most often when I am invited to speak at other universities begins with a brief introduction to genomes, sets up some comparisons between bacteria and eukaryotes, and then moves into a short overview of bacterial genome size evolut ...

Article - T. Ryan Gregory - Jan 24 2008 - 4:50pm