Evolution

About 45 years ago, Penn evolutionary biologist a Daniel Janzen reasoned that change in species from site to site across mountain ranges in the tropics should be greater than in temperate latitudes…

Maybe it is not just sentimental. Perhaps the connection to "man's best friends" is literally in our heads. Skull shape is a complex trait, involving multiple genes and their interactions. Thanks to…

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article entitled "What is life - Part 1" describing various aspects of life that dealt with the issues of "intent" and "purpose".  These are obviously heavily…

Want to feel small? Humans have been included in the most comprehensive tree of life to-date on placental mammals. And placental mammals are the largest branch of the mammalian family tree, with more…

You would think after thirty years of numerous critics exposing the shortcomings of the selfish gene hypothesis, that its proponents would have become a little more circumspect, a little more…

To many, DNA represents the definitive code which governs all life.  It has been compared to a sophisticated computer program from which every aspect of an individual organism is built. Equally…

An international team of researchers sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China and found that the…

“It is demonstrable,” said he, “that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for…

A recent article titled ‘Protective buttressing of the human fist and the evolution of human hands’ rests on the assumption that human evolution has been characterised by competition for mates,…

This past May, I was fortunate enough to take part in a conference in Venice, Italy, which was a retrospective on the legacy of famous paleontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould 10 years after his…