The concept of altruism, a selfless concern for the welfare of others, a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core aspect of various religious traditions,  has long been debated in…

In an earlier article titled What is Life?, I took the reader through a reasoning process to finally arrive at the conclusion that, contrary to general expectation, finding a definition of life is…

This is a little old, but Thomas Mailund, who writes on of my favorite blogs, has posted a video interview with Svante Pääbo, the scientist leading the neanderthal genome project. At one point Pääbo…

Welcome to the 17th edition of the Carnival of Evolution. This month, we celebrate not only great evolution blogging around the web, but also some of the best evolution writing of all time. 150 years…

In this article I am going to suggest that this arbitrary separation is meaningless.  Much like physics had to come to terms with wave-particle duality, biology must consider the same…

A few days ago, I was working at home when the phone rang. I answered, and was surprised to hear a soft, accented voice asking for me. It was Lada Tsokolova, calling from Germany, with the sad news…

 Has evolution selected the best possible features for the species existing nowadays, or has it  done a second-hand job with whatever was available? We all have in mind that evolution from…

Two letters to Nature today burst into data about a gamma-ray burst, GRB 090423. The first is A -ray burst at a redshift of z  8.2 by N. R. Tanvir et al. The second is GRB …

Get your submissions in for a special, 150th Origin of Species anniversary edition of the Carnival of Evolution, going online November first. I've already received a whole slew of outstanding…

A LiveScience article entitled "Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans" raises several questions of which many are simply the quest for details regarding origins and migrations.  However, there…