Search
Evolutionary Biology
A gigantic bacterium evolved differently than fundamental models of biology would have predicted. Simply put, these bacteria shouldn't exist.
An ancient continent called Balkanatolia rose and fell in the area in and around what is now the eastern Mediterranean.
Planet Earth has been around for over 4.5 billion years, but humans? For 99.998% of our planet's history, humans were nowhere to be found.
Life is possible because of asymmetries, such as an imbalance between matter and antimatter and the "handedness" (chirality) of molecules.
The Kardashev scale ranks civilizations from Type 1 to Type 3 based on energy harvesting.
After it became clear that the world wasn't 6,000 years old, some proposed that northern peoples had emerged independently from others.
The story of dog domestication is one of converting the wild wolf into man's nicer, smarter, best friend. It might be all wrong.
The ten greatest ideas in science form the bedrock of modern biology, chemistry, and physics. Everyone should be familiar with them.
A new analysis of an ancient hominin fossil sheds light on the "Out of Africa" dispersal events that occurred more than one million years ago.
Dating of volcanic ash suggests the remains are at least 230,000 years old.
Once numbering just 27 birds, the global population of California condors is now in the hundreds.
In movies and TV shows, aliens look like pointy-eared humans. Is this realistic? If evolution is predictable, then it very well might be.
From 1974 to 1978, the chimps of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania were at war with each other, the first time conservationists saw chimps engage in calculated, cold-blooded killing.
Whether or not life exists elsewhere in the Universe, we can be assured of one thing: We are the only human beings in the cosmos.
Tusks suddenly became a liability, even though in natural circumstances, tusks are very useful.
Life largely owes its existence to this equation. Be sure to hug your house plant today.
Bears, chimps, or humans? A track of five poorly preserved footsteps at Laetoli has puzzled paleontologists for decades. Now, a research paper from Nature claims to have solved the mystery.
Evolutionary game theory could tip the advantage to medicine.
Today, every Homo species is extinct besides humans. But one of our close evolutionary relatives still lives on in our DNA.
The human brain makes a striking deviation from the normal building plan.
Missing link? More like the weakest link.
This map of Hutterite colonies in North America says something about religion and evolution — and more precisely, speciation.
An evolutionary biologist explains why you probably won't grow a tail.
Are we really only a moment away from "The Singularity," a technological epoch that will usher in a new era in human evolution?
Society-changing ideas form through a three-stage process, argues author Michael Bhaskar.
Virgin birth – which involves the development of an unfertilised egg – has preoccupied humans for aeons. And although it can’t happen in mammals, it does seem to be possible in […]
Although many dinosaurs never left the ground, they still possessed the basic structural framework for flight.
Most of us will never run a 4 minute mile. But on a bicycle, almost anyone can do it. As human beings, we often take for granted how our bodies work. […]
Yes, the Big Bang is real, but what about what came before? If you ask anyone about the origin of some phenomenon that we’ve observed, they’ll usually default to the same […]