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Category: Evolution

Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe

Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe

NASA By Nick Longrich, University of Bath Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely – or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations – not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself – were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning…

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Neanderthal legs and feet — suited to sprinting

Neanderthal legs and feet — suited to sprinting

By Anna Goldfield If you’re like me, you view long-distance running as a somewhat unrealistic aspiration and see those people who do it well as remarkable creatures. The truth, though, is that Homo sapiens are well-designed for loping along for long distances across open landscapes—especially when compared to Neanderthals. They had legs and feet that, recent research suggests, were better suited to sprinting, squatting, and hilly hiking than to running. Unlike the open African plains in which H. sapiens lived…

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For microorganisms, cooperation rather than competition, is the key to survival

For microorganisms, cooperation rather than competition, is the key to survival

The University of Copenhagen reports: New microbial research at the Department of Biology reveals that bacteria would rather unite against external threats, such as antibiotics, rather than fight against each other. The report has just been published in the scientific publication ISME Journal. For a number of years the researchers have studied how combinations of bacteria behave together when in a confined area. After investigating many thousands of combinations it has become clear that bacteria cooperate to survive and that…

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Fast evolution explains the tiny stature of extinct ‘Hobbit’ from Flores Island

Fast evolution explains the tiny stature of extinct ‘Hobbit’ from Flores Island

An Indonesian island was home to H. Floresiensis – but how did the dwarfed human species evolve? areza taqwim/Shutterstock.com By José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho, Universidade Federal de Goias and Pasquale Raia, University of Naples Federico II It’s not every day that scientists discover a new human species. But that’s just what happened back in 2004, when archaeologists uncovered some very well-preserved fossil remains in the Liang Bua cave on Flores Island, Indonesia. The diminutive size of this new human species,…

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Cell-bacteria mergers offer clues about how organelles evolved

Cell-bacteria mergers offer clues about how organelles evolved

Viviane Callier writes: There are few relationships in nature more intimate than those between cells and the symbiotic bacteria, or endosymbionts, that live inside them. In these partnerships, a host cell typically provides protection to its endosymbiont and gives it a way to propagate, while the endosymbiont provides key nutrients to the host. It’s a deeply cooperative arrangement, in which the genomes of the host and the endosymbiont even seem to contribute complementary pieces to each other’s metabolic and biosynthetic…

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Do human beings have an instinct for engaging in warfare?

Do human beings have an instinct for engaging in warfare?

David P Barash writes: The most serious problem with [the American anthropologist Napoleon] Chagnon’s influence on our understanding of human nature [through his study of the Yanomami people of the Venezuelan/Brazilian Amazon] is one familiar to many branches of science: generalising from one data set — however intensive — to a wider universe of phenomena. Academic psychologists, for example, are still reeling from a 2010 study by the University of British Columbia which found that the majority of psychological research…

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Where our minds go when words let us down

Where our minds go when words let us down

Kenneth S. Kosik writes: The drive to express ourselves can be joined with the sense that we cannot quite express ourselves fully, that language is inherently the limiting factor. Why should that be? Via a complex circuitry, the brain delivers motivation to the body as a motor command to execute its will. One view is the brain is busy making predictions about the world such as what we will see when we turn the corner. If we are surprised by…

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Complex birdsongs help biologists piece together the evolution of lifelong learning

Complex birdsongs help biologists piece together the evolution of lifelong learning

Vocal learning in birds is a lot like how people learn language. Alexandra Giese/Shutterstock.com By Cristina Robinson, Vanderbilt University; Kate Snyder, Vanderbilt University, and Nicole Creanza, Vanderbilt University Bonjour! Ni hao! Merhaba! If you move to a new country as an adult, you have to work much harder to get past that initial “hello” in the local language than if you’d moved as a child. Why does it take so much effort to learn a new language later in life?…

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Evolution doesn’t proceed in a straight line — so why draw it that way?

Evolution doesn’t proceed in a straight line — so why draw it that way?

Evolution has no final endpoint in mind. Uncle Leo/Shutterstock.com By Quentin Wheeler, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry; Antonio G. Valdecasas, CSIC – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and Cristina Cánovas, CSIC – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas A high school marching band’s T-shirt places a horn-playing Homo sapiens at the end of the evolutionary process. Brian Kloppenburg, Jordan Summers, Main Street Logo Evolution doesn’t follow a preordained, straight path. Yet images abound that suggest…

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Did parasite manipulation influence human neurological evolution?

Did parasite manipulation influence human neurological evolution?

Christopher Packham writes: It seems so obvious that someone should have thought of it decades ago: Since parasites have plagued eukaryotic life for millions of years, their prevalence likely affected evolution. Psychologist Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico is not the first researcher to suggest that the evolution of the human brain could have been influenced by parasites that manipulate host behavior. But tired of waiting for neurologists to pick up the ball and run with it,…

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Eye-opening discovery: 54 million year old fossil flies yield new insight into the evolution of sight

Eye-opening discovery: 54 million year old fossil flies yield new insight into the evolution of sight

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Eyes surprise: fossil eyes from a 54 million year old cranefly. Lindgren et al./Nature By Mike Lee, Flinders University Fossilised flies that lived 54 million years ago have revealed a surprising twist to the tale of how insects’ eyes evolved. These craneflies, unveiled in Nature today, show that insect eyes trap light the same way as human eyes, using the pigment melanin – yet another example of evolution finding similar solutions to similar problems. Read more: Eye to the past:…

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We are not at the center of the microbial world

We are not at the center of the microbial world

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Ed Yong writes: Aside from those of us with access to microscopes, most people will never see microbes with their own eyes. And so we tend to identify microbes with the disease-causing minority among them, the little buggers that trigger the tickling mist of a sneeze or the pustule on otherwise smooth skin. We become aware of their existence when they threaten our lives, and for much of our history, that threat was substantial. Epidemics of smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, and…

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Why people and parrots know how to dance

Why people and parrots know how to dance

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Ed Yong writes: Before he became an internet sensation, before he made scientists reconsider the nature of dancing, before the children’s book and the Taco Bell commercial, Snowball was just a young parrot, looking for a home. His owner had realized that he couldn’t care for the sulfur-crested cockatoo any longer. So in August 2007, he dropped Snowball off at the Bird Lovers Only rescue center in Dyer, Indiana—along with a Backstreet Boys CD, and a tip that the bird…

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Why did octopuses become so smart?

Why did octopuses become so smart?

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Ed Yong writes: A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills. Once released, it moves to protect itself—it grabs discarded seashells and swiftly arranges them into a defensive dome. Thanks to acts like these, cephalopods—the group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—have become renowned for…

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The dancing species: How moving together in time helped make us human

The dancing species: How moving together in time helped make us human

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By Kimerer LaMothe Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an ‘I’. Dancing remains a vital, generative…

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