Driving home just now through my neighborhood, I encountered an opossum crossing the road. I try not to think or speak ill of any creature (except …
Birds Gotta Fly, Fish Gotta Hop
Transitional fossils offer tangible evidence of evolution. Examples include feathered dinosaurs, tetrapod-like fish, and the pterosaur I described in …
How The Gray Wolf Turned Black
My previous post concerned an apparently beneficial genetic variant, common in modern humans, that some researchers suspect we picked up via sex with …
Sex, Microcephalin, and Neanderthals
The publication last month of a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome stoked quite a bit of excitement, much of it over the question of whether …
Male Antelope Lie To Get Sex
Earlier I mentioned examples of critters that lie to get what they want. Last week in American Naturalist Jakob Bro-Jørgensen and Wiline M. Pangle …
Octopus Aces Physics Homework
Here's a question from my daughter's physics homework. A balloon with a weight tied to it just barely floats. If the balloon is pushed down under the …
Survival of the Fittest? Not Always.
Are the fittest always the ones who survive? I'm thinking of "fitness" in its everyday meaning, not its technical meaning. We might expect that the …
Language, Lying, and Evolution
I recently received an email from a cognitive psychologist asking whether it is plausible that human use of language for deception is an adaptation. …
Genomic Analysis of Identical Twins Finds Few Differences
There's an intriguing paper in today's issue of Nature. Sergio E. Baranzini and colleagues looked at three pairs of identical twins, two female pairs …
Genomic Analysis of Identical Twins Finds Few DifferencesRead More
