evolution
Challenging evolutionary psychology: Philosopher attacks the field’s underlying scientific foundation
It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field. Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what ...
‘AI in archeology’ pinpointing new excavation sites at an ‘unimaginable’ pace
Archaeologists have uncovered scores of long-abandoned settlements along coastal Madagascar that reveal environmental connections to modern-day communities. They have detected ...
Feeling a bit stir crazy during the pandemic lockdown? Blame it on human evolution
Humans are intensely social creatures. We all need company and social contact. But for many of us, being at home ...
‘From pipsqueaks to titans’: The complicated evolution of dinosaurs
For tens of millions of years, even as other dinosaur species grew to huge sizes, 40-foot carnivores weren't around. How, ...
We’re still searching for a key piece of our evolutionary tree—our most recent ancestor
Humans’ most recent ancestor, the species that predated our kind, remains shrouded in mystery. Anthropologists still don’t know what species ...
Podcast: Tracing humanity’s roots: uncovering history and genetic diversity in Africa
We explore the genetic diversity in the birthplace of humanity and discover the cultural and historical stories written in the ...
‘Crazy beast’ fossil shows how weird evolution can get
Researchers have uncovered the fossil of an early mammal named the "crazy beast" that lived 66 million years ago on ...
Coronavirus evolutionary tree can illuminate pandemic’s ‘past, present and possible future’
For anyone who knows how to look, the past, present, and possible futures of the new coronavirus can be found ...
7 things we learned about human evolution in the past decade, including that we are older than we thought
To mark the 10th anniversary of the Smithsonian’s “David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins,” here are some of the ...
‘Genetic scrambling’ over millions of years makes it difficult to understand Earth’s earliest life
Biologists have long hoped to understand the nature of the earliest living organisms on Earth. If they could, they might ...
‘Overly simplistic’: Women may have been more than just ‘gatherers’ in ancient times, studies suggest
Sexual divisions of labor characterized ancient societies, but were not as rigidly enforced as has often been assumed, [two] new ...
Seeking the ‘secret ingredient’ that led to life on Earth. Researchers may have discovered it
Think of the RNA world as a pot of gazpacho. We prepare ingredients and then stir them into a single ...
‘Not alone’: 3 different human ancestors may have lived together in South Africa 2 million years ago
An international team, including Arizona State University researcher Gary Schwartz, have unearthed the earliest known skull of Homo erectus, the ...
Puzzling over the mysteries of human pregnancy: Why is labor so long and dangerous?
From an evolutionary perspective, human pregnancy is quite strange, says University at Buffalo biologist Vincent Lynch. "For example, we don't ...
Part of the forensic ‘jigsaw puzzle’: Tooth shape offers insights into a deceased person’s genetic makeup
A study found that some characteristics of dental remains — such as crown groove patterns, cusp size, number of roots, ...
Why ‘beauty’ is an evolutionary conundrum that even Darwin couldn’t solve
The genius of evolution is its brutal pragmatism; do whatever is needed to pass your genes onto the next generation ...
Language evolved 25 million years ago, monkey brain study suggests
Curious about how people started talking, researchers from the UK scanned the monkey species and the brains of the people ...
Gods of genetic engineering: With the end of ‘Homo sapiens naturalis’ approaching, what is our place in nature?
Our society has evolved so much, can we still say that we are part of Nature? If not, should we ...
Viewpoint: Human ‘evolutionary changes’ inevitable from pandemics
We all know that viruses are living organisms that can evolve and change, but did you also know that they ...
Making the case for a ‘semi-aquatic’ phase in human evolution
For the past 150 years, scientists and laypeople alike have accepted a “savanna” scenario of human evolution. The theory, primarily ...
‘Like trying to hit a moving target’: Why it’s so difficult to attack cancer with targeted gene therapies
We are, it seems, still a long way off from a cure, in any ordinary sense of the term. Yet ...
Mysterious African skull could be part of undiscovered ‘ghost population’
A mysterious but well-preserved hominid skull found nearly a century ago comes from a population that lived in Africa around ...
Targeting cancer cells by ‘putting the brakes’ on their ability to mutate and evolve
The vast majority of cancer deaths in the US come about not because of a lack of treatment, but because ...
Discovery of microbes under ocean floor suggests life could thrive in ‘extreme environments’ like Mars
When scientists find microbial life thriving in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, it gives them hope that ...
Searching for signs of Earth’s earliest life more than ‘a needle-in-the-haystack’ problem
The search for signs of Earth’s earliest forms of life isn’t quite like looking for dinosaur bones protruding out from ...
Origins of symmetry: This ancient worm-like creature may be a key to our own evolution
A worm-like creature that burrowed on the seafloor more than 500 million years ago may be key to the evolution ...
Viewpoint: GMOs are ‘unnatural’? Evolution explodes a popular crop biotech myth
The most controversial element of biotechnology is a trick we learned by experimenting on some of the simplest life forms in ...
