Australian researchers have provided the first support for a 60-year-old evolution theory - that species with multiple colours in the same population evolve into new species faster than those with one…
The penis. It comes in so many different shapes and sizes … and that’s just in humans. As you would imagine, different species have very different penises. The males in most mammal species, including cats…
People often ask me whether natural selection continues to operate on modern humans in industrialised societies, even though technology has liberated so many from hunger and early death. My answer is always…
A report published today in Nature by Yohannes Hailie-Selassie and co-workers outlines the importance to our evolutionary story of some very ancient foot bones discovered recently in the Rift Valley of…
The fossilised remains of three people found in southwest China could belong to an unknown species that was related to modern humans and survived until the end of the Ice Age 11,000 years ago. The discovery…
The origin of the human species remains one of the most fascinating and difficult topics of modern science. One of the main reasons for this is a continuing lack of agreement about how we should define…
Few of us consider that having sex could result in a violent, instantaneous death. But in nature, where sex and violence are often two sides of the same coin, many animals are routinely subjected to such…
We evolutionary biologists over-enthuse at times about the competitive nature of selection. Observing animals in the wild often compels one to agree with the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes…
There’s something degenerate in every male (no, seriously). We members of the facial-hair-bearing sex carry, among the 23 pairs of chromosomes in every one of our cells, an odd pair of sex-chromosomes…
The proportion of people with desirable physical traits could rapidly accelerate over a few generations with the aid of a diet that tweaks particular genes, a study suggests. Research by a team at Sydney’s…