Evolution

Skin color varies according to latitude and therefore by the intensity of incident ultraviolet light; according to biologists, that is why individuals living at low latitudes developed darker skin,…

In the last 20,000 years, Europeans and Asians became numerous and their descendants now comprise the bulk of our 7 billion population. Prior to that, for 130,000 years, the Khoisan (they call…

Usually blind sages revealing the secrets of the universe are Asian. Scotland doesn't get enough respect that way but a centipede is defying the stereotype. Arthropods are one of Earth's real success…

Insects are the most diverse group of animals on earth. They inhabit nearly all terrestrial habitats. One of the factors underlying this success is the ability of insect eggs to survive in adverse…

We like to think of evolution as a fine-tuning process, one that whittles away genetic imperfections and redundancies and converges on a more efficient system because of 'survival of the fittest'.…

Most people think that biting is the way that aquatic creatures capture prey. Not so, instead suction is far more common. That is why the diversity of skull shapes in biters is so much greater,…

The human Y chromosome has retained only 3% of its ancestral genes. So why is it a shadow of its former self? Rafael Anderson Gonzales Mendoza/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA By Jenny Graves, La Trobe University…

The bobtail squid and bioluminscent bacteria are just one of hundreds of examples of mutualism. Klaus Stiefel/Flickr, CC BY-NC By Alex Jordan, University of Texas at Austin Reproduction for a female…

The 1KITE project (1,000 Insect Transcriptome Evolution) seeks to understand the millions of living insect species that shape our terrestrial living space and both support and threaten our natural…

8 percent of our genome derives from retroviruses that inserted themselves into human sex cells millions of years ago and right now the koala retrovirus (KoRV) is invading koala genomes. Koalas are…