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Natural Selection
Mars was warmer and wetter long ago. If anything was alive there, what came next was either a tragedy or a masterclass in survival.
54mins
“How can all the diversity and, sort of, seeming order that's out there in the world emerge from a process dependent upon chance?”
13mins
“Chance invents and natural selection propagates that chance invention.”
7mins
“The idea of evolution by natural selection is, for me, probably the most beautiful idea in biology.”
After more than a million years of separation, two branches of humanity reunited around 300,000 years ago, suggests new research.
2mins
The ocean is evolving, and it’s not based on the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Astrobiologist Betül Kaçar explains how it’s not competition that has kept the ocean alive, but collaboration.
43mins
"If we're related to every living thing on the planet, do we not have a special responsibility for every living thing on this planet? They are really all our relatives."
Science writer Matt Ridley joins us to discuss how “Darwin’s strangest idea” makes us all a bit feather-brained (in a good way).
We need a "theory that explains the evolution of evolution," argues theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker.
The Universe changes remarkably over time, with some entities surviving and others simply decaying away. Is this cosmic evolution at work?
Some biologists believe natural selection produces animals that are just good enough. Dawkins disagrees.
3mins
Don’t fall into the determinism trap. Everything is, in fact, random, says chemist Lee Cronin:
The true story of the shot that "reverberated through England" when science collided head-on with religion.
3mins
The mind-blowing theory that everything is evolving—from minerals to music—explained in 3 minutes by a Carnegie scientist.
For billions of years on Earth, life was limited to simple unicellular, non-differentiated organisms. In a mere flash, that changed forever.
"Superhabitable" planets might be real, but Earth is probably as good as it gets.
7mins
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Nurse defines the 5 core principles of life.
Thinking about the problem of meaning is unsettling because it introduces us to a list of solutions that all feel a bit insane.
John Templeton Foundation
That scary swirling void from which nothing can escape is our perfect universal translation tool.
At least one of Earth's creatures is able to survive the vacuum of space.
Darwin missed an amazing example of evolution.
Evolution repeatedly hit upon this solution simply because it works.
Bathybius haeckelii was briefly thought to be the link between inorganic matter and organic life.
Are there any advantages to looking so cumbersome?
4mins
Some scientists see religion as a threat to the scientific method that should be resisted. But faith "is really asking a different set of questions," says Collins.
John Templeton Foundation
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.
