Quentin Wheeler, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry; Antonio G. Valdecasas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), and Cristina Cánovas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
If you go by editorial cartoons and T-shirts, you might have the impression that evolution proceeds as an orderly march toward a preordained finish line. But that’s not right at all.
Biologists investigated whether birds that search for multiple mates would evolve ever more elaborate songs to attract them. What they found might have surprised Darwin.
A young shore crab displaying varied colouring.
Aleksey Stemmer/Shutterstock
Was Darwin inspired by the tropical wildlife of his travels to discover natural selection? Actually, pigeons, worms and barnacles were far more prominent in his thinking.
Some of the ‘remarkable beetles’ Wallace collected in Borneo.
A.R. Wallace
An evolutionary biologist visits the remote jungle mountaintop where a little-known naturalist wrote his insightful paper about the mechanisms of evolution that spurred on a rivalrous Charles Darwin.
Holding on in hurricane-force winds.
Colin Donihue
In the wake of two hurricanes in the Turks and Caicos Islands, researchers document for the first time that catastrophic storms can be agents of natural selection, influencing how species evolve.
A stick insect in Borneo: variation and natural selection has resulted in insects with the astonishing ability to mimic features in their natural environment.
Shutterstock
In this age of the pseudo-factual, its more important than ever to acquaint ourselves with the foundations of the scientific tradition, such as Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Sunrise at noon in the Arctic. Little exposure to sun was a piece of the genetic puzzle.
Bering Land Bridge National Preserve
Why was one gene mutation that affects hair, teeth, sweat glands and breasts ubiquitous among ice age Arctic people? New research points to the advantage it provided for ancestors of Native Americans.
A core idea in molecular biology is that one gene codes for one protein. Now biologists have found an example of a gene that yields two forms of a protein – enabling it to evolve new functionality.
Reconstruction of the bite wound affecting the shoulder of our herbivorous dinosaur.
Zongda Zhang/Lida Xing