Evolution

It takes two to reproductively tango for humans but even when plants  (or animals) can self-fertilize their offspring have longer lives when a mate is involved in the process, according to over…

I receive a lot of inquisitive emails from intelligent laymen, and today I received a nice one that asked, in so many words, “Is natural selection fast enough to explain the complex biology we find…

I liked it. Overall, I think the Discovery Channel did a good job of capturing the painstaking work that goes into scientific research, in this case spanning more than 15 years from discovery to…

The folks over at Science and Religion Today were interested in our study on graduate student conceptions of evolution, and asked me to give some thoughts on the question "How detailed an…

I need most of my body parts. I figure I have my various meaty chunks for good evolutionary reasons, and far be it from me to sell any, no matter how often that creepy guy shows up at my door with a…

Researchers studying Rhesus Macaque mothers and writing on their results in Current Biology have determined that interactions of macaque mothers with their infants have a lot of similarity to human…

My real life has swamped my online one recently, and so I failed to note that the 16th Carnival of Evolution is up at the excellent blog Pleiotropy. Bjørn has managed to collect 50,228 words of…

In my recent article on Understanding natural selection in E:EO, I reviewed a large number of studies that examined conceptions of evolution among students from the high school to undergraduate level…

Tomorrow's Science will be a special issue reporting tons of new information on the fossil hominid Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi"), which is really exciting (though not as much as Darwinius, which was…

Researchers writing in Science have described Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.   The last common ancestor shared by humans and…