Evolution

Show Me The Science Month Day 20 Tumor cells wield the enzyme heparanase like a machete to cut a swaththrough the dense forest of carbohydrates that make up the stickymatrix that helps hold…

The commercials featuring the Geico caveman made it seem as if a Neandertal (also neanderthal) could readily interact within a Homo sapiens society.... we may soon find out if that is true. Recently…

Show Me The Science Month Day 19 Some fish have two sets of teeth: oral teeth, set towards the front of the mouth (like ours), and so-called pharyngeal teeth, set far back in in the throat in a…

If it walks like a duck and talks like it a duck....it may, in fact, be a bikini model...  Okay, likely not. But we do sometimes group insects, animals and plants together because of superficial…

Show Me The Science Month Day 18 The transition from one-celled microbes to multicellularity was a huge step in the evolution of life on this planet, but as daunting as this evolutionary step seems…

Show Me The Science Month Day 17 Often when something new crops up in evolutionary history, it's usually the result of tinkering with functional, preexisting molecular tools.. In a paper published…

I guess it was only a matter of time before my colleague Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago lost his patience while reading one of several pieces that appeared in the press about the current…

Show Me The Science Month Day 16 Black wolves look like creatures out of frightening fairy tales, but their black color actually came from pet dogs. Today's evolution paper is about a potentially…

Show Me The Science Month Day 15 What happens when a big chunk of your genome is accidentally copied? Bad things could obviously happen when when sudden and dramatic changes are made to your genome…

       “The Extended Phenotype – The Long Reach of the Gene” is the book Richard Dawkins wants you to read “if you read nothing else of mine” because “It is probably the finest…