Ancestry & Evolution
The desire to understand our origins is primal. By examining our DNA over successive generations through the evolutionary process of inherited characteristics of human and animal populations–as well as from those species from which humans share a common ancestry–we can decipher our individual and collective past and develop medical innovations for the future.
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Podcast: How male sex drive evolved
For decades, scientists suggested that fatherhood fulfilled a primarily evolutionary function: protecting and providing for offspring in return for sex ...
Maybe Darwin got it wrong: ‘Survival of the Friendliest’
Most people assume that Darwin was talking about physical strength when referring to “survival of the fittest,” meaning that a ...
Evolutionary puzzle: Why do fraternal twins exist?
The chances of having fraternal twins changes with maternal age and is heritable ...
Number instinct: Numerical ability is deeply rooted in our shared animal evolution
Considering the multitude of situations in which we humans use numerical information, life without numbers is inconceivable. But what was ...
Greta could be the first wooly mammoth-elephant hybrid—and the loneliest animal in the world
The room is bright and her bath is warm. A clamp slides over her sides. She squeals as it hoists ...
Infographic: Power of evolution? How oak trees came to dominate North American forests
Over the course of some 56 million years, oaks, which all belong to the genus Quercus, evolved from a single undifferentiated ...
Facing taboos: Conversation with GLP’s Jon Entine on sustainable agriculture, race and sports, ‘Jewish genetics’ and social investing
Jon Entine is an American science writer. He is the founder and executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, a ...
Evolution heresies: Revisiting Lamarckian and collective evolution
In his most famous work, Charles Darwin proposed that this amazing process is governed by a simple rule: selection of ...
What are ‘supergenes’ and how do they impact evolution
Biologists identified 37… so-called 'supergenes' in wild sunflower populations, and found they govern the modular transfer of a large range ...
Less lizard, more bird? What Jurassic Park got wrong about this dinosaur
The dinosaur [from Jurrasic Park] is mostly imagination, but a new comprehensive analysis of Dilophosaurus fossils is helping to set ...
Where did strawberries comes from? Genomics, art history help trace evolution of fruits and vegetables
Plant geneticists seeking to understand the history of the plants we eat can decode the genomes of ancient crops from ...
Viewpoint: Activist opposition to GMOs fueled by an ‘extremist’ vision of nature
We would like to take the opportunity on #Worldenvironmentday to come back to a problem we have been thinking about ...
How ancient fish fins gave rise to modern human hands
In 1859 Charles Darwin remarked… in On the Origin of Species: “What can be more curious than that the hand ...
Humans vs. apes: Women are the secret factor explaining how we evolved to populate the world
The populations of the great apes were once nearly equal. Now, one great ape species—Homo sapiens—outnumbers the rest by almost ...
Vikings were not the first global voyagers. Bronze age Norwegians likely sailed the seas 2,000 years before
[A]rchaeologists who study Norway during the Bronze Age have discovered a great deal of new information. ... People who lived ...
Why did fatherhood evolve?
We might take the doting modern dad for granted, but if you take a look at the rest of the ...
350 million years ago, a thinning atmosphere sparked a mass extinction. We’re headed in the same direction
Scientists noticed that around the time of the Hangenberg Crisis, [fern] spores began to look strange. Some were much darker ...
How an event in what is now the United States may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire
With a new analysis of particles found in ice cores, researchers determined that [Alaskan volcano] Okmok's eruption coincided with Rome's ...
Zealandia revealed: Maps and interactive tools uncover backstory of Earth’s ‘lost’ eighth continent
Earth's eighth continent is 94% underwater.... ... Zealandia — or Te Riu-a-Māui, as it's referred to in the indigenous Māori ...
Why did menopause evolve?
To explain menopause, any hypothesis needs a plausible evolutionary scenario. It is reasonable to assume that the chimp/human common ancestor ...
What caused anatomically modern Homo sapiens to evolve into behaviorally modern people?
At some point, from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviourally modern humans in a ...
Ancient African savanna was like a ‘chess board’, broadening the minds of early humans as they hunted for prey
Northwestern University researchers recently discovered that complex landscapes—dotted with trees, bushes, boulders and knolls—might have helped land-dwelling animals evolve higher ...
Extraterrestrial neighbors? Our galaxy contains over 30 intelligent civilizations, new calculations suggest
In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake equation, setting out seven factors that would ...
Recreating evolution: Human gene triggers bigger brains in monkeys
Researchers in Germany and Japan introduced a human-specific gene to the fetuses of common marmosets, Callithrix jacchus. In turn, that ...
DNA analysis of 5,000-year-old Irish remains reveals an incestuous elite social class
[Researchers found] an adult male buried at the 5,000-year-old Newgrange monument; his DNA revealed that his parents were first-degree relatives, ...
Estrogen slows down adult bone growth, leading to generally taller men and shorter women
Human sexual size dimorphism, the difference in height between males and females, is often touted as a classic example of ...
Dead or alive? The cosmology of viruses
Viruses are an inescapable part of life, especially in a global viral pandemic. Yet ask a roomful of scientists if ...
