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The Beasts That Keep the Beat
...and Aniruddh Patel were interested in the evolutionary origins and neuroscience of rhythm and music. At the time, there was no documented evidence that nonhuman animals could dance — or,...
In Warm, Greasy Puddles, the Spark of Life?
...properties that don’t fit anything not alive. A few of them are simple: reproduction, evolution, and metabolism. Many scientists study individual steps in the emergence of life, such as how...
A Timely Fix for a Grand Theory of Nature
...up and spinning out to affect the evolution of the ecosystem. In the new study, the team focuses on two forests, one in Panama and one in Malaysia. Using census...
How to Build Life in a Pre-Darwinian World
...expected. “Maybe there was some simpler form of evolution that preceded Darwinian evolution,” said Niles Lehman, a biochemist at Portland State University in Oregon. The Pre-Darwinian World When most people...
Searching for the Algorithms Underlying Life
...all the knowledge an individual has must have been acquired either through learning or through the evolutionary process. And if this is so, then individual learning and evolutionary processes should...
The Incredible Shrinking Sex Chromosome
...use to determine sex are in a remarkable state of flux. When one system is destroyed, evolution seems to easily come up with a new one. Birds, fish and snakes...
Solution: ‘Be Still My Pulsating Sequence’
...evolution has hard-wired Occam’s razor in our brains, and the gradual increase in the complexity of the universe from simple beginnings also makes such elegant patterns more likely in nature....
The Information Theory of Life
...from? We of course know that all life on Earth has enormous amounts of information that comes from evolution, which allows information to grow slowly. Before evolution, you couldn’t have...
How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains
...evolutionary biologist Peter Wheeler proposed the “expensive tissue hypothesis” as a possible answer. The underlying logic is straightforward: Human brain evolution likely required a metabolic trade-off. In order for the...