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Category: Evolution

How beauty is making biologists rethink evolution

How beauty is making biologists rethink evolution

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Ferris Jabr writes: A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers,…

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Humans: The least aggressive primate

Humans: The least aggressive primate

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Richard Wrangham writes: A few years ago, I stayed in Kenya with the conservationists Karl and Kathy Ammann, who kept a rescued chimpanzee named Mzee in their home. Even as a young adult, Mzee was generally well-behaved and trustworthy. Yet he could be impulsive. At one point, over breakfast, Mzee and I reached for the jug of orange juice at the same time. He grabbed my hand as I held the jug, and he squeezed. Ouch. “You first!” I squeaked….

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Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy

Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy

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Ann Gibbons writes: Neanderthals are still among us, Janet Kelso realized 8 years ago. She had helped make the momentous discovery that Neanderthals repeatedly mated with the ancestors of modern humans—a finding that implies people outside of Africa still carry Neanderthal DNA today. Ever since then, Kelso has wondered exactly what modern humans got from those prehistoric liaisons—beyond babies. How do traces of the Neanderthal within shape the appearance, health, or personalities of living people? For years, evolutionary biologists couldn’t…

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Cells talk in a language that looks like viruses

Cells talk in a language that looks like viruses

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Carrie Arnold writes: For cells, communication is a matter of life and death. The ability to tell other members of your species — or other parts of the body — that food supplies are running low or that an invading pathogen is near can be the difference between survival and extinction. Scientists have known for decades that cells can secrete chemicals into their surroundings, releasing a free-floating message for all to read. More recently, however, scientists discovered that cells could…

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The sugar that makes up DNA could be made in space

The sugar that makes up DNA could be made in space

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Science News reports: Parts of DNA can form in space. For the first time, scientists have made 2-deoxyribose, the sugar that makes up the backbone of DNA, under cosmic conditions in the lab by blasting ice with radiation. The result, reported December 18 in Nature Communications, suggests that there are several ways for prebiotic chemistry to take place in space, and supports the idea that the stuff of life could have been delivered to Earth from elsewhere. “It tells us…

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The discovery of vast populations of subsurface microbial beings is shaking up what we think we know about life

The discovery of vast populations of subsurface microbial beings is shaking up what we think we know about life

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JoAnna Klein writes: At the surface, boiling water kills off most life. But Geogemma barossii is a living thing from another world, deep within our very own. Boiling water — 212 degrees Fahrenheit — would be practically freezing for this creature, which thrives at temperatures around 250 degrees Fahrenheit. No other organism on the planet is known to be able to live at such extreme heat. But it’s just one of many mysterious microbes living in a massive subterranean habitat…

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Our world and our brains have been profoundly shaped by bees

Our world and our brains have been profoundly shaped by bees

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Tim Flannery writes: According to Thor Hanson’s Buzz, the relationship between bees and the human lineage goes back three million years, to a time when our ancestors shared the African savannah with a small, brownish, robin-sized bird—the first honeyguide. Honeyguides are very good at locating beehives, but they are unable to break into them to feed on the bee larvae and beeswax they eat. So they recruit humans to help, attracting them with a call and leading them to the…

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What a newfound kingdom means for the tree of life

What a newfound kingdom means for the tree of life

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Jonathan Lambert writes: The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus nor any recognized type of protozoan — that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes). Instead, this flagella-waving oddball stands as the first…

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An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have

An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have

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By Deborah M Gordon Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This question leads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the…

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Should evolution treat our microbes as part of us?

Should evolution treat our microbes as part of us?

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Jonathan Lambert writes: Twilight falls on the Tanzanian plain. As the sky turns a deeper purple, a solitary spotted hyena awakens. She trots along the border of her clan’s territory, marking the boundary with a sour paste from under her tail. She sniffs a passing breeze for hints of itinerant males interested in mating, giving little attention to her stomach’s rumbling over the remnants of the previous night’s hunt or the itch on her flank. The lone hyena chooses what…

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Does language spring from the things it describes?

Does language spring from the things it describes?

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Mark Vernon writes: In conversation at the Hay Festival in Wales this May, the English poet Simon Armitage made an arresting observation. Discussing the nature of language and why it is so good at capturing the experience of being alive, he said: ‘My feeling is that a lot of the language that we use, and the best language for poetry, comes directly out of the land.’ Armitage was placing himself within the Romantic tradition’s understanding of the origins of language,…

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A tiny change in brain organization without which humans never could have evolved

A tiny change in brain organization without which humans never could have evolved

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Douglas Fox writes: Suzana Herculano-Houzel spent most of 2003 perfecting a macabre recipe—a formula for brain soup. Sometimes she froze the jiggly tissue in liquid nitrogen, and then she liquefied it in a blender. Other times she soaked it in formaldehyde and then mashed it in detergent, yielding a smooth, pink slurry. Herculano-Houzel had completed her Ph.D. in neuroscience several years earlier, and in 2002, she had begun working as an assistant professor at the Federal University of Rio de…

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The first animal genus defined purely by genetic characters represents a new era for classifying animals

The first animal genus defined purely by genetic characters represents a new era for classifying animals

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Charlie Wood writes: The world’s simplest known animal is so poorly understood that it doesn’t even have a common name. Formally called Trichoplax adhaerens for the way it adheres to glassware, the amorphous blob isn’t much to look at. At just a few millimeters across, the creature resembles a squashed sandwich in which the top layer protects, the bottom layer crawls, and the slimy stuffing sticks it all together. With no organs and just a handful of cell types, the…

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The microbiologist who fundamentally changed the way we think about evolution and the origins of life

The microbiologist who fundamentally changed the way we think about evolution and the origins of life

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David Quammen writes: On Nov. 3, 1977, a new scientific revolution was heralded to the world — but it came cryptically, in slightly confused form. The front page of that day’s New York Times carried a headline: “Scientists Discover a Form of Life That Predates Higher Organisms.” A photograph showed a man named Carl R. Woese, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, with his feet up on his office desk. He was 50ish, with unruly hair, wearing…

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The new story of humanity’s origins in Africa

The new story of humanity’s origins in Africa

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Ed Yong writes: There is a decades-old origin story for our species, in which we descended from a group of hominids who lived somewhere in Africa around 200,000 years ago. Some scientists have placed that origin in East Africa; others championed a southern birthplace. In either case, the narrative always begins in one spot. Those ancestral hominids, probably Homo heidelbergensis, slowly accumulated the characteristic features of our species—the rounded skull, small face, prominent chin, advanced tools, and sophisticated culture. From…

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Mice don’t know when to let it go, either

Mice don’t know when to let it go, either

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Erica Goode reports: Suppose that, seeking a fun evening out, you pay $175 for a ticket to a new Broadway musical. Seated in the balcony, you quickly realize that the acting is bad, the sets are ugly and no one, you suspect, will go home humming the melodies. Do you head out the door at the intermission, or stick it out for the duration? Studies of human decision-making suggest that most people will stay put, even though money spent in…

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