evolution
Why do humans mate in private? Instinct or morality?
A debate has emerged as to why humans mate in private while every other animal – except the Arabian babbler ...
Origins of life: We are getting closer to recreating the bubbling primordial soup
At 158 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius), the vents are a bit hot for a bubble bath but, it turns ...
Podcast: From the Black Death to COVID-19—Investigating the ancient war between genes and disease
Kat Arney looks at the ancient war between our genes and the pathogens that infect us, from the Black Death ...
How the Hobbit films illustrate the way human brains evolved
For Northwestern University neuroscientist and engineer Malcolm MacIver, [a scene from the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey where Gandalf and Bilbo ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Biotechnology gives plant breeders a leg up in ‘evolutionary arms race’ against crop diseases
While crop pests and diseases can be spread by environmental factors, such as the wind, they also move into new ...
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 ...
Why did fatherhood evolve?
We might take the doting modern dad for granted, but if you take a look at the rest of the ...
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 ...
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 ...
Waterhemp weed uses genetic ‘tricks’ to outsmart herbicides, threatening farmers’ crop yields
The weed that represents the biggest threat to Midwestern corn and soybean production, waterhemp, has outsmarted almost every kind of ...
It started with rocks: How we developed belief, our ‘most creative and destructive’ ability
About 20 years ago, the residents of Padangtegal village in Bali, Indonesia, had a problem. The famous, monkey-filled forest surrounding ...
‘Speech-like signature’: Chimpanzees’ lip-smacks rhythm may offer clues about how we learned to talk
The evolution of speech is one of the longest-standing puzzles of evolution. However, inklings of a possible solution started emerging ...
Could COVID-19 cause wives to cheat? How pandemics affect sexual desire
The coronavirus has impacted society and affected our behaviour in many ways from an increase in our use of social ...
Podcast: Out standing in the field – the highs and lows of fieldwork
We talk to the researchers studying genetics and evolution in action, from chasing butterflies up mountains to artificially inseminating kakapos ...
How weird can life on earth get? Check out these creatures found in deep arctic waters
How should we get our children, our parents and anyone else excited about biodiversity of tiny Arctic microalgae or Arctic ...
Podcast: Pesticides prevent cancer. Growing drugs in GMO plants; battling diabetes with CRISPR
Rapid advances in biotechnology could help prevent hundreds of thousands of diabetes deaths every year. Growing drugs in GMO plants ...
Outside of ‘occasional surges’, biodiversity evolution has been largely stagnant for millions of years, studies suggest
The traditional view is that species have increased in diversity continuously over the past 200 million years, particularly in the last ...
