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We may have to thank Christian monks for today's chicken.
#wingmen.
Chow down.
*pause*
These fish are quite comfortable out of water.
It's all about the tail.
This means being carnivores must have been an excellent solution for these plants.
Researchers have found a very old and "alien like" insect and they've decided it doesn't fit anywhere in the current tree of life.
Real-time evolution, what more proof do you need?
Our beloved hands are coded by the same genes that make fish fins.
Kinda looks like an end-boss in an RPG.
Looks like happy hour isn't just a human thing.
The discovery highlights how trait functions can change with evolution.
University of Rochester researchers developed a new evolutionary model that suggests human intelligence developed to meet the demands of our infants, in a self-reinforcing cycle: bigger brains led to shorter pregnancies, requiring parents to have even bigger brains.
A deep, low pitch voice is often sought after in a man, but a new study suggests this characteristic might have evolved to intimidate other males, not attract females.
Found in only eight caves on the border of Thailand and Myanmar, this eyeless fish can walk.
What does a weird tendon on your inner wrist have to do with evolution? This video explains.
Researchers have manipulated the genome of chicken embryos so that they develop dinosaur-like bones in their lower legs.
A new study measuring the forces that shape bacterial genomes determined that a difference in efficiency of hundredth of a percent is sufficient to determine the winners and losers in the evolutionary race.
The latest, most complete tree is the result of a three-year effort by researchers from over a dozen institutions from around the world. They combined tens of thousands of diagrams into one single tree, most easily read as a circle.
New research shows that the first vertebrates had a surprisingly easy time adapting from fins to legs.
A new study examined the way gene families evolve from ancestral genes, finding the original genes were promiscuous in that they had a wider range of function than the later descendant genes, which often evolved to be more selective in their effects.
Where are all the aliens? Why haven’t we seen or heard their signals from space? Could we really have been the only planet where life evolved?
Once with the advent of agriculture, and its spread to Europe from the Near East, human society was transformed forever. Resources became more plentiful, communities could stay in one place and develop, and humans were free to pursue other activities. Agriculture turbo boosted the division of labor, an essential prerequisite to any civilization. Agriculture not only transformed human society, it also modified our DNA. A first of its kind study compared the DNA of ancient humans who lived between 8,500 and 2,300 years ago. The analysis revealed that humans underwent widespread genetic changes that influence height, immune system, digestion and skin colour once agriculture was introduced.
As more Millennials are leaving religion in droves, or choosing not to identify with any faith, acceptance of evolution among the public strengthens.
Self-preservation and reproduction are the most powerful instincts, and life forms on Earth have devised all sorts of gimmicks and tactics to become successful (pass on those genes). Just look at the male ruff sneak tactics to grab girls. There are three distinct approaches: the cocky aggressive, the sneaky 'satellite, and the cross-dresser. You might think this isn't necessarily peculiar in itself. After all, human males employ similar approaches to seek women's attention. The peacock, the friend-zone dude, the jock, the joker etc. What's odd about ruff males is that this behavior is coded inside their genes - from the way they act, to how their plumage looks like. And they're all, ultimately, males of the same species.
The concepts of biodiversity and evolution are generally thought of as something that occurs in thousands, maybe millions of years - but every once in a while, scientists catch a species red handed: evolving, becoming a new species.
We humans arguably came to dominate the world thanks to our dexterous hands, which allow gripping tools and manipulating objects. An eccentric professor at University of Utah agrees, but with a twist. According to David Carrier there's a secondary evolutionary driver that led our hands to reach their current shape and dexterity: fist punching. To illustrate his hypothesis, Carrier turned to a macabre experiment in which cadaver hands clenched in various positions, from open hand to a good old sucker punch fist, were bashed against a dumbbell. Carrier showed that a fist could handle the strike with double the force supported by an open hand before bones started to break.
A new paper published Thursday in Science looks at how climate change is (out of all things) making the tongue of some bumble bees shrink. Two species of alpine bumbles in the Rocky Mountains already show a decrease in tongue volume of nearly 25 percent in the last 40 years; and smaller tongues could spell big trouble for the flowers that rely on bumble bees for pollination.
Some researchers have made an interesting connection: if you measure the complexity of life or how big the genome is you find it increases at a rate that seems exponential. It's very similar to Moore's law, which suggests the number of transistors over the same surface area on a chip doubles almost every two years. You can extrapolate both forward and background. Eventually, if you extrapolate down enough you'll find the point of origin. In other words, it's possible to estimate when life first appeared based on life's complexity graph.
Love is complicated enough, even without intense scrutiny from scientists. Do we fall in love with someone because we find our partner's genetic makeup to be satisfying and thus improve the chance of having better offspring? Or is it a bit more mysterious than this - a lot more personal? For humans, the latter looks like the case, but we're far from being alone. Zebra finches, which are also monogamous, choose their mates for idiosyncratic reasons as shown by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. The finches who chose their partners based on behavioral compatibility were less likely to shrug from their parental duties and had offspring which had the best chance of reaching adulthood. This elegant experiment proves that choosing a mate isn't all about who has the brightest plumage or the biggest stomach - love has a huge part to play as well. The similarities to humans are uncanny.
A robotics team lead by Cambridge University engineer Fumiya Iida have designed a robot that archeologists of the future (they will all be robots) will recognize as the moment the machines started to take over. They built a "mother" device that can create smaller, "baby" robots, and programed it (her?) so that experience obtained building them would be used to improve upon further generations.
Duke University researchers made micro CT scans of the skull of ancient monkey and found its brain, though tiny by modern standards, was far more complex than previously thought. The fossils, discovered in Kenya in 1997, belong to a monkey ancestor who lived some 15 million years ago.
Despite a huge gap in public acceptance, the theory of evolution and natural selection is not a controversial theory. It is widely accepted by the scientific community and is, in fact, one of the most successful scientific idea in history. Yet, billions of people around the world discard evolution and uphold a creationist view of how humans, other creatures or the whole cosmos came to being. Ironically, it may be the way that our own brains evolved and supported the adaption of our species that supports a natural predisposition towards creationism. This idea is supported by a paper published in Cognition which found persons who rely more on intuition than analytical thinking are more likely to discard evolution and vice-versa.
Joining sounds together to create a meaningful language was thought to be a human characteristic, but a new study published in PLoS Biology found that blabber birds also developed their own phonetic language, just like we did! Researchers also believe that studying these birds could give us hints of why and how our language evolved to what […]
Today, ray-finned fish make up 99% of all fish species, but it wasn't always like this. In an attempt to find out what triggered this spectacular multi-niche dominance, paleontologists traveled back in time sort of speak and analyzed ancient fossils to see what the fish diversity makeup looked like millions of years ago. Intriguing enough, the ray fish practically exploded in their diversity right after the last great mass extinction which occurred 65 million years ago. An asteroid impact wiped out thousands of species, including all dinosaurs. But there was now enough room for other creatures to take their place. On land, mammals started filling in the large-scale niches eventually reaching a dominant position. In the water, it was the ray-finned fish that seized the opportunity.
Studying the fossil remains of an ancient reptile-like creature, paleontologists gained valuable clues and insights that help explain how turtles got their most uncanny feature: the shell. The newly named species, Pappochelys, Greek for “grandfather turtle", lived some 240 million years ago and fills an evolutionary sweet spot sitting between earlier turtle ancestors and more recently established species.
When the freakish Hallucigenia was first discovered in the 1970s, paleontologists found it nearly impossible to distinguish heads from tail. Now, the bizarre creature - an ancestor to molding animals like crabs, worms or krill - had its features identified with unprecedented precision, but that doesn't mean it's less freakish looking: worm-like with a mouth adorned with a ring of teeth, bearing seven pairs of legs ending in claws, and three pairs of tentacles along its neck. To finish it off, its back was covered with enormous spikes. Yes, it looks weird, but so were most animals that lived 500 million years ago during the so-called Cambrian explosion - a period of massive bloom in terms of diversity of life and evolution. Most creatures of those times were somewhat primitive, but remarkably Hallucigenia was quite advanced for its age.
A new analysis conducted by Yale researchers revealed that the first snakes may have actually evolved on land, not in water. These proto-snakes were likely night hunters that might have had hind legs and even toes. “We generated the first comprehensive reconstruction of what the ancestral snake was like,” said Allison Hsiang, lead author the […]
Most evolutionary biologists seem to agree, based on fossil record, that the birds of today are direct descendants of dinosaurs, and that the first bird ancestors evolved some 150 million years ago. Though valuable, fossil records alone are not enough to recreate the DNA migration and tweaking that occurred to give rise to the avian family. What if you went from your original product (the bird) and genetically traced your steps backwards millions of years into the past? This is where a novel research might come in made by a collective from Harvard, Yale and several other universities. The scientists used the knowledge their garnered in eight years of research about how bird beaks form in the embryo stage to shut down key protein sequencing to basically breed birds with primitive, dinosaur-like snouts.
A seven year old has discovered the fossil of a turkey-sized dinosaur that roamed South America over 140 million years ago. The tiny dinosaur was related to T-Rex, but had few similarities to it; aside for its size, the dinosaur was a vegetarian, munching on plants instead of terrorizing other creatures.
European males are on average 11 centimeters taller now than they were in the 1870s, which is quite a lot by all means. Everybody makes fun of Napoleon for being short, but as a matter of fact he was actually standing above average height! Thank better nutrition and medicine for that. Even so, what in the world are the Dutch eating that makes them this tall? The average Dutchman now stands over six feet tall, and while the rest of the world seems to have stopped, they're still riding a growing trendline. The answer by actually be evolutionary - the tall Dutchmen have more babies.
While he was only 22 years of age, Charles Darwin sailed on the ship H.M.S. Beagle to the Galapagos Island on a trip that would later inspire him to write the theory of evolution. Paramount to his evolutionary theories was his study of finches. He identified 13 different species differentiated by beak size, and correctly concluded that the different beaks were adaptations to different diets available among the islands. This was a powerful example of divergent evolution - varieties which diverge from some original species. For instance, domestic dogs from wolves. One powerful driver of divergent evolution is physical isolation. Each left to its own island, Darwin's finches evolved specialized traits. On California's Santa Cruz Island, however, a most peculiar finding was made. Katie Langin, a biologist at Colorado State University, discovered two varieties belonging to the same species (Aphelocoma californica or the Scrub Jay) which diverged despite the absence of a physical barrier. Isolation drives speciation, but not in this case. Granted, the two Scrub Jay populations are essentially the same species. And yet, this is still definitely very, very weird. And we're only beginning to understand what's happening.
Marine animals today are 150 times larger than they were 540 million years ago, according to a new study which seems to suggest evolution favors animals bigger in size.
There's no secret that evolution directly contradicts religious views on creationism. What's surprising, however, is that many people who are scientifically literate - that is, they're knowledgeable about scientific topics and appreciate its practical usage on a day to day basis - reject mainstream scientific accounts of evolution and the big bang, Around one in five Americans fall in this scope, according to Timothy L. O'Brien, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Evansville and the lead author of the study. This suggests that scientific literacy does not necessarily imply accepting well established science when it contradicts deeply entrenched religious views.
A far from definite, yet highly interesting explanation for the origin of language was recently proposed – not by linguists or geneticists, but by a psychologists who took an archaeological route. Thomas Morgan, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley presents us with a chicken or the egg dilemma: was tool use proliferated by language […]
Scientists have made a significant step towards developing fully artificial life – for the first time, they demonstrated evolution in a simple chemistry set without DNA. In a way, the researchers showed that the principle of natural selection doesn’t only apply to the biological world. Using a simple a robotic ‘aid’, a team from the University of […]
Have you ever wondered why you crave for a drink from time to time or why you can drink alcohol in the first place, for that matter? Our ability to ingest and metabolize ethanol can be traced back to a common primate ancestor who lived some 10 million years ago, according to US researchers who […]
An international team of more than 100 scientists has undertaken a most complex and challenging task: they’ve determined the timings and patterns of evolution for most of the insect family tree, until they arrived at at the original insect foremother which lived some 500 million years ago. Thus, the researchers were able to pinpoint when the […]
An exceptional Biologists duo who have studying an ecosystem from the Galapagos Islands for the past 40 years have made one of the most important discoveries in evolutionary biology - the birth of a new species!
