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A Bird’s-Eye View of Nature’s Hidden Order
...eagles, for instance, to spot mice from a mile high), and his lab studies the evolutionary adaptations that make this so. Many of these attributes are believed to have been...
Why Are There Two Sexes?
...saw in the May insights column, Can Darwinian Evolution Explain Lamarckism?, evolutionary-fitness calculations over many generations are essentially serial multiplications. And there’s a key difference between asexual and sexual populations....
In Birds’ Songs, Brains and Genes, He Finds Clues to Speech
...of bird genomes — something he’s now helping to do for thousands of vertebrate species as a co-chair of the Genome 10K Project — in order to construct accurate evolutionary...
Solution: ‘How Equality and Inequality Shape Birds and Bees’
Puzzle solvers explored how evolution may have used negative and positive control mechanisms to shape the conflicting parental functions of reproduction and child rearing. Our October Insights puzzle explored how...
Rapid Oxygen Changes Fueled an Explosion in Ancient Animal Diversity
...doubt that it was an extraordinary and baffling episode in evolutionary history. Why animal life got more complicated in such a hurry remains a burning question for paleontologists and evolutionary...
Can New Species Evolve From Cancers? Maybe. Here’s How.
...like a life cycle,” Aktipis said. “There’s nothing special about the evolutionary process that says you can only evolve a life cycle if you are a branch of the evolutionary...
Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins
...these events are happening all over the place,” said Aylwyn Scally, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge. “But it’s very hard for us to pin down any particular...
The Year in Biology
...evolution successfully merged two or more cells into one, and about the mathematical tricks that organisms use in the course of their embryonic development. Advances in genome analysis helped to...
Nature Versus Nurture? Add ‘Noise’ to the Debate.
...as unexplained environmental effects. Which leaves noise — the random tremors and fluctuations that characterize any biological process. “Noise is inevitable,” said Andreas Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at the University...