Evolution

Most mammals aren't monogamous, nor are most anything except birds, where it happens in about 90% of cases.  It's actually quite rare in mammals (5%), so why did it evolve? Was it to be better…

Male guppies must not be very sexy, because they have evolved an extreme way to hold on to a female that interests them, even if that affection is unrequited: claws on their genitals to make it…

Adineta vaga, the delloid rotifer, abandoned sex yet still produced more than 460 species over evolutionary time. Rather than the standard way of using sexual reproduction to weed out harmful…

When is a tuna more like a seahorse than a marlin? Science! The first comprehensive phylogeny of the "spiny-rayed fish," a group that includes about a third of all living vertebrate species, has been…

An unknown physiologic mechanism of evolutionary biology has been the ability of mammals to manipulate the sex ratios of their offspring as part of a highly adaptive evolutionary strategy. A new…

Madagascar represents only one percent of the earth's area but is home to about three percent of all animal and plant species on the planet - it has long been known as a hotspot of biodiversity. New…

Sir Archibald Henry Bodkin, KCB (1862–1957) was our British Director of Public Prosecutions from 1920 to 1930.  He particularly took a stand against the publication of what he saw as ‘obscene’…

As I was reading the comment section to “Our Anthropomorphic  Bias” I was struck by the persistence shown by Sascha Vongehr in referring to humans as robots in 4 of the 5 comments he made in a…

The Red Queen hypothesis, a popular idea in evolution named after Lewis Carroll's character who in "Through the Looking Glass" described her country as a place where "it takes all the running you can…

In several posts the question of biological costs is invariably mentioned in discussing evolution.  These costs are normally of the metabolic or fitness type.  Metabolic costs are…