A year or so back Carl Zimmer asked the science world if life could be defined in three words.I don’t think he would have been too concerned if the answer was in four or five or six words, the point…

In many animals, the brain is located in a specific structure like the head, along with sensory organs and often together with the mouth. However, there are distantly related animals which have a…

Understanding how and why diversification occurs is important for understanding why there are so many species on Earth.  A new study found that similar, or even identical, mutations can occur…

About 45 years ago, Penn evolutionary biologist a Daniel Janzen reasoned that change in species from site to site across mountain ranges in the tropics should be greater than in temperate latitudes…

Maybe it is not just sentimental. Perhaps the connection to "man's best friends" is literally in our heads. Skull shape is a complex trait, involving multiple genes and their interactions. Thanks to…

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article entitled "What is life - Part 1" describing various aspects of life that dealt with the issues of "intent" and "purpose".  These are obviously heavily…

Want to feel small? Humans have been included in the most comprehensive tree of life to-date on placental mammals. And placental mammals are the largest branch of the mammalian family tree, with more…

You would think after thirty years of numerous critics exposing the shortcomings of the selfish gene hypothesis, that its proponents would have become a little more circumspect, a little more…

To many, DNA represents the definitive code which governs all life.  It has been compared to a sophisticated computer program from which every aspect of an individual organism is built. Equally…

An international team of researchers sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China and found that the…