Evolution

Is a recent PNAS paper a knock against evolution? Does it support a "the concept of a preexistent design, with front-loaded genetic programs"? Nonsense. PZ explains why. Go read this if you're at all…

Two years ago, I had t-shirts made up for my evolution course that depicted Darwin's notebook sketch of a simple tree diagram capped by the words "I think". In total, we generated about $500 for…

Katy Kao, assistant professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, and Stanford University colleague Gavin Sherlock say their new study of yeast cells has resulted in the most…

While the scientific community, and most of the intelligent world, has widely accepted that the theory of natural selection is underlying mechanism of organic evolution, until recently our studies of…

A series of papers in the journal Zebrafish provides a comprehensive look at future directions of research on pigment biology, stating that model organisms such as zebrafish can advance the…

In 1943 the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger gave a series of lectures in Dublin that were later published in book form under the title What Is Life? Its success was considerable as it kick-…

Can you tell why this passage comparing Darwin's finches and humans is wrong? Many paths lay open when the finches first arrived, and the smallest flights and trials of their descendants were…

In his book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Stephen Jay Gould speculated about an experiment of ‘replaying life’s tape’, wherein one would go back in time, let the tape…

"Raw materials were not an issue" for the evolution of the first life on earth, argues Henderson Cleaves, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution, quoted in Carl Zimmer's Science essay on origins of…

That's because there is going to be so much great, non-technical writing in honor of Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin of Species. We're going to…