Evolution

Botany: A Blooming History And now we return to part one of this series 1. A Confusion of Names We now meet Thomas Fairchild (1667? – 1729).  Wikipedia is rather terse about him:…

Harry Lonsdale, a 79 year old millionaire scientist, has launched a $50,000 prize to promote research in the origin of life. The prize could potentially be complemented by $2,000,000 (!) of research…

The term sperm competition can be used in two ways. In the broad sense, it involves a large range of morphological, behavioural and physiological attributes, including courtship and copulation…

The world is changing. Climate change, deforestation, and much more, are all having an impact on our litlle planet. A question that follows this statement quite naturally, is 'Will the earth's…

Charles Darwin was, among many things, an avid reader, and by the end of his life he had created his own small library. Not only did he read a lot, but he also compared his ideas with those proposed…

If Hollywood movies are your science guide, outer space is populated primarily by hot vampire girl aliens and time travel is not only possible, but chicks will dig you more, the same way women today…

Recently, research has been conducted to see if certain life-history traits could be correlated with DNA mutation rates. By using whole-genome sequence data for 32 species of mammal, the researchers…

When I was a teenager, my two scientific passions were astronomy and botany.  However, at my school in the early 1960s, one could either do A-levels in Mathematics - Physics - Chemistry (…

What's ailing biology? Wilson da Silva, Editor-in-Chief of COSMOS, a science publication in Australia, was attending a lecture by Freeman Dyson lecture at the Perimeter Institute in Canada when Dyson…

In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins introduced the word ‘meme’ (derived from the Greek word mimema, roughly translates as ‘something imitated’) to denote “a unit of cultural transmission, or…