Search
Evolutionary Biology
An increase in genetic regulatory elements explains how modern humans evolved bigger brains than other hominins.
We got lucky with our evolutionary history.
Tracing the origin and development of jaws — and other anatomical features that humans share — sheds some light on how we came to be.
Just as human beings diversified so that people in Asia look different from people in Europe, so too did their microbiomes.
Sex can be a death trap even for modern toad and frog species.
6mins
Darwin, Descartes, and Maxwell all believed in these science ‘demons.’
John Templeton Foundation
One tiny change might have made a huge difference.
At a fundamental level, only a few particles and forces govern all of reality. How do their combinations create human consciousness?
Despite the fact that both species shared a similarly large neocortex, scientists still have many questions about how closely the function of their brains resembled our own.
Catfish taste with their whole bodies - and that’s just one way animals sense the world totally differently than us.
Are there any advantages to looking so cumbersome?
3mins
Pro-athletes are entertainers. Being healthy means something else.
A common weed uses uncommon types of photosynthesis.
Nietzsche both wished he was as stupid as a cow so he wouldn’t have to contemplate existence, and pitied cows for being so stupid that they couldn’t contemplate existence.
The 557-million-year-old specimen challenges the theory that animal body plans were laid out in the Cambrian explosion.
Human beings are descendants of these early tetrapods – at least those who made a new life on land.
While becoming a monk is an evolutionary dead end for the individual, celibacy reaps benefits for the group as a whole.
Let's hope that squid don't evolve lungs and legs, or humanity might be in real trouble.
Evolutionary psychology could explain those otherworldly feelings.
8mins
The history of music from bone flutes to Beyoncé.
A second Enlightenment would have a far bigger task: Saving civilization itself.
Turning off a gene called “Myc” has a surprising effect in male fruit flies: They start courting other males.
More humans are being born with a third arm artery, an example of microevolution happening right before our eyes.
Mammals have a history stretching back 325 million years. To study that ancient history is to know our own origins.
Predatory dinosaurs with big skulls tend to have tiny arms. Researchers propose there might be a direct link between those traits.
New research finds that dinosaurs were already adapted to living in cold climates before the end-Triassic mass extinction. But how?
Genetic analysis reveals that a specimen collected in 2019 is the same subspecies as one caught more than a century earlier.