David Quammen
Viewpoint: We still don’t know where COVID truly came from. Should we be concerned?
Ongoing mystery: We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here's what we do know — and why it matters ...
Viewpoint: Should the US House investigate COVID origins? Here’s the case for leaving that to scientists
One of the world’s most sensitive and consequential scientific questions will soon be grist for discussion among the members of ...
It’s not just humans that get COVID — other animals are susceptible too
Humans aren't the only mammals susceptible to infection by, or testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. There have been instances among quite ...
‘Dark angels of evolution, terrific and terrible’: How viruses have shaped evolution, for better or for worse
[Many] viruses bring adaptive benefits, not harms, to life on Earth, including ours. We couldn’t continue without them. We wouldn’t ...
Viewpoint: Evolution works – just look at the ‘success’ of the coronavirus
The scope and the devastation of the pandemic reflect bad luck, yes, and a dangerous world, yes, but also catastrophic ...
Horizontal gene transfer: The tricky part of evolution never imagined by Charles Darwin
Biologists have long recognized that the boundaries of one species may blur into another—by the process of hybridism, for instance ...
‘The Tangled Tree’: Book explores what’s wrong with Darwin’s theory of evolution
Until recently, the central tenets of Darwin’s theory of evolution, from how heredity works to the gradual variation in species, had ...
Discovering a ‘third kingdom’: How this scientist upended Darwin’s ‘tree of life’
On Nov. 3, 1977, a new scientific revolution was heralded to the world — but it came cryptically, in slightly ...
Finding Ebola’s hiding place key to stopping another major outbreak
No one foresaw, back in December 2013, that the little boy who fell ill in a village called Méliandou, in ...