Evolution

What killed the Neanderthals? No one can say for sure but an international study led by the University of Leeds has ruled out one of the popular recent theories, catastrophic climate change, as the…

How we come to express the genes of one parent over the other is now better understood through studying the platypus and marsupial wallaby – and it doesn’t seem to have originated in association with…

In evolutionary terms, the difference between 2.1 and 2.2 children is a lot more important than the small difference sounds, especially as it accumulates over time. A new study in Royal Society…

Dating younger women is not just about trophy wives, say the researchers behind the PLoS paper, "Why Men Matter: Mating Patterns Drive Evolution of Human Lifespan." It's also about understaning…

Cooperation is widespread in the natural world but so too are cheats – mutants that do not contribute to the collective good but simply reap the benefits of others’ cooperative efforts. In…

Natural selection has driven two closely related species of fish in Lake Malawi down different evolutionary paths - even though they live side by side. An international team of scientists from Canada…

Ancient footprints have provided compelling evidence that some dinosaurs were able to swim. The 15m (50ft) trackway was discovered in the Cameros Basin in Spain, which, 125 million years ago, in the…

Men really only think about women, it seems, even to the point of evolving to be more attractive to them. Men with large jaws, flaring cheeks and large eyebrows are sexy, at least in the eyes of our…

Humans and chimpanzees share 99 percent of their genetic makeup but how those genes are used is the key difference, say Duke researchers. In two major traits that set humans apart from chimps and…

It is not just what’s in your genes, it’s how you turn them on that accounts for the difference between species — at least in yeast — according to a report by Yale researchers in this week’s issue of…