When aliens come to Earth to investigate life here, they don’t simply beam up a specimen and start probing. (And they’re also, by the way, not disproportionately interested in the anus.) Only a…

A series of articles in the January 26 issue of PNAS illustrates recent progress in applying evolutionary theory to a range of questions in medicine and public health, and may lead to medical…

Using high resolution genome sequencing, an international team of researchers has tracked a particularly virulent strain of MRSA as it traveled between South America, Europe and Southeast Asia. The…

In my library at home, I have three books that catch the eye because of their unusual heft. One is my old copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and another is Stephen J. Gould’s massive…

According to a new study in the American Naturalist that compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, domestic dogs have followed their own…

A new paper published in Zoologica Scripta argues that the distributions of the major primate groups are correlated with Mesozoic tectonic features and that their respective ranges are congruent with…

As described in my profile, I don't want to blog about my own field of research. However, in anticipation of questions about my research, I'm going to write this introductory post. So far, all my…

 Air flows in one direction as it loops through the lungs of alligators, just as it does in birds, and this breathing method may have helped the dinosaurs' ancestors dominate Earth after the…

While people typically blame incompetency when airport security screeners fail to keep dangerous weapons off airplanes or when doctors miss developing cancer tumors, the real culprit may be evolution…

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say the subtle but ongoing pressures of human evolution could explain the seeming rise of disorders such as autism,…