When I was a teenager, my two scientific passions were astronomy and botany.  However, at my school in the early 1960s, one could either do A-levels in Mathematics - Physics - Chemistry (…

What's ailing biology? Wilson da Silva, Editor-in-Chief of COSMOS, a science publication in Australia, was attending a lecture by Freeman Dyson lecture at the Perimeter Institute in Canada when Dyson…

In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins introduced the word ‘meme’ (derived from the Greek word mimema, roughly translates as ‘something imitated’) to denote “a unit of cultural transmission, or…

The human face is, by far, one of the most complex features that has stumped the scientists in the field of developmental science. The recent debates on human face transplant makes it obvious that…

In a recent set of posts there was a discussion about evolutionary psychology and how it can be used to explain various behaviors.  However, one of the fundamental challenges raised is whether…

Aggression in mating males is a successful reproductive strategy for individuals but a numerical model says it can drive a species to extinction, Evolutionary biologists have long debated whether the…

As a teenager, in the early 1960s, I developed an interest in botany, and in particular ferns and the so-called “fern-allies”.  So, living in the drier South-East of England, I welcomed trips to…

Rice, the eponymous food of Asia, originated in China, and domesticated rice may have first appeared as far back as approximately 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley of China. Previous research…

Cool.

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the mosquito branched off the same evolutionary tree as the house fly around 220 million years ago.   Though only a…