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.
Below is the complete archive of related articles sorted by date.
Biodiversity crisis? Humans may actually be creating more species than we’re killing
Chris Thomas … a professor of conservation biology at the University of York in the UK … does not deny that ...
Gay conversion? Grotesque brain implants used to try to ‘cure’ homosexuality
[Editor's note: John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology.] Homosexuality has been treated with lobotomies, ...
Neanderthal-human mating reintroduced lost African genes, for better and worse
When Neandertals mated with modern humans, they shared more than an intimate moment and their own DNA. They also gave ...
Is the universe really 13.8 billion years old?
[Editor's note: Ethan Siegel is an astrophysicist and author.] You've no doubt heard that the Universe itself has been around for ...
Genetics brought to bear in fight against modern cholera outbreaks
Although cholera is a disease that is thought of as mostly extinct, it still persists today in underdeveloped areas. The ...
Deteriorating bio-libraries house thousands of disappearing cultures and deadly diseases
Freeze-dried and locked away in liquid nitrogen–filled vaults around the world are hundreds of thousands of microbial cultures. In the ...
Tale of two brains: One from normal child, another from abused child show impact of neglect
The primary cause of the extraordinary difference between the brains of these two three-year-old children [pictured below] is the way ...
Genetics of attraction: Unique women’s body smells attract men
The team, based at the University of Bern, wanted to know if a protein called human leukocyte antigen, or HLA, ...
High IQ and health: Are more Intelligent people more prone to illnesses?
A new paper claims that very intelligent people are more prone to mental illnesses and allergies. Mensans reported levels of illness higher ...
Time to stop treating men and women the same when it comes to drug treatments
Studies have shown that males and females metabolize drugs differently, suggesting we should be spending more time studying those differences ...
If you lose any of these 7 organs, you’ll probably be OK
The human body has dozens of organs, with some clearly more critical than others. But there are several you can ...
First alien life forms we encounter could well be robots
[T]he first aliens we encounter are likely to be machines, and they’ll be almost unimaginably old. Susan Schneider of the ...
Preserved fatty tissues found in 48-million-year-old bird fossil
[R]esearchers have confirmed that fatty tissues were still identifiable in the partial fossil of a 48-million-year-old bird. The new research hints ...
Viewpoint: How genetics challenges the ‘folk notion’ of distinct races
Speaking from the BBC studio in London where he hosts the weekly radio program Inside Science, [geneticist Adam] Rutherford explains how ...
One-fourth of cow genome descendant from snakes and lizards, study shows
There are genes known as retrotransposons that can copy themselves and paste the duplicates in other parts of our DNA, ...
Why the quest for artificial intelligence almost died in infancy
It feels as if we’re riding the wave of a novel technological era, but the current rise in neural networks ...
Polygamy and genetics: Short Creek, Utah’s inbreeding mutation epidemic
[In 1990], 10-year-old boy was presented to Theodore Tarby, a doctor specialising in rare childhood diseases. ... [S]oon Tarby had diagnosed a ...
What’s so important about sleep?
It’s common to try to cram more waking hours into each day. About half of people worldwide get less than ...
Searching for ET in our Solar System requires methodical approach
The quest to find life in our Solar System is focused on locating planets or moons with the right chemical ...
De-extinction debate: Why we should bring back the woolly mammoth
De-extinction is just what it sounds like: taking a species that has gone extinct, and through cloning or genetic engineering, ...
Why hunter-gatherer civilizations did not destroy themselves through inbreeding
Much like hunter-gatherers today, ancient Eurasians married outside their home groups and formed webs of friends and in-laws vital for ...
Racists are wrong: Both light and dark skin originated in Africa
[L]ong-held racist assumptions based on skin color have been scientifically proven wrong, according to a groundbreaking new study in the ...
Ancient ‘Tianyuan man’ is full-fledged Homo sapiens
When scientists excavated a 40,000-year-old skeleton in China in 2003, they thought they had discovered the offspring of a Neandertal and ...
Human extinction could come within 5,100 years
Every day, it seems, brings with it fresh new horrors. Mass murder. Catastrophic climate change. Nuclear annihilation. It's all enough to make a ...
Mild to murderous: Zika’s one mutation evolution
Zika has been around for some time – first identified in 1947 in Uganda - but it was never really given much thought. It ...
Pumpkins, cucumbers, and watermelons diverged from a single melon ancestor
About 100 million years ago, the genome of a single melon-like fruit copied itself. Over time, this one ancestor became ...
What do your Neanderthal genes do?
By sequencing a remarkably complete genome from a 50,000-year-old bone fragment of a female Neandertal found in Vindija Cave in ...
