Evolution

In my library at home, I have three books that catch the eye because of their unusual heft. One is my old copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and another is Stephen J. Gould’s massive…

According to a new study in the American Naturalist that compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, domestic dogs have followed their own…

A new paper published in Zoologica Scripta argues that the distributions of the major primate groups are correlated with Mesozoic tectonic features and that their respective ranges are congruent with…

As described in my profile, I don't want to blog about my own field of research. However, in anticipation of questions about my research, I'm going to write this introductory post. So far, all my…

 Air flows in one direction as it loops through the lungs of alligators, just as it does in birds, and this breathing method may have helped the dinosaurs' ancestors dominate Earth after the…

While people typically blame incompetency when airport security screeners fail to keep dangerous weapons off airplanes or when doctors miss developing cancer tumors, the real culprit may be evolution…

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say the subtle but ongoing pressures of human evolution could explain the seeming rise of disorders such as autism,…

As a young woman from France working as a civil servant in Liverpool in 1999, I once stumbled upon a book in a discount book shop, which was going to change the way I would look upon things. The book…

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers is challenging the theory that the origin of life stems from a system of self-catalytic molecules capable of…

While fossils may provide some tantalizing clues about human history, they also lack vital information needed to understand the past, such as which pieces of human DNA have been favored by evolution…