About 10% of couples who want a baby have fertility problems and causes offered tend to break down around advocacy issues; environmentalists blame pollution while psychiatrists point to our stressful…

Belemnoteuthis antiquus is technically not a squid, but a belemnite. Belemnites were the first cephalopods (as far as we know) to develop the ingeniously internalized shell that led to the radiation…

Should early 20th century researcher Paul Kammerer be credited as the founder of epigenetics?   It would certainly be a dramatic change from current perceptions of his work. Kammerer, a leading…

Birds have a wide variety of vibrant plumages and have evolved various chemical and physical mechanisms to produce these beautiful colors over millions of years.  When did feathers first get…

Can even the human form grow tiring?This ORGY of a culture wepresuppose to be endlessly entertaining - perpetually self-gratifying -could it all be an elementary school yard game?Our brains areslowly…

The lowly appendix used to get no respect and was simply regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact but two years ago researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a…

Not only is Hamilton's Rule not a rule, it isn't even a strong suggestion.  The relationship c rb (1), doesn't begin to qualify as a meaningful description of anything. The first problem one…

Garter snakes like to eat newts. Newts don't like to be eaten, and to deter snakes from eating them, they have evolved a seriously lethal neurotoxin. This toxin, called tetrodotoxin (TTX), is…

It doesn't take a catastrophe to end entire lineages. (Well, for the dinosaurs it did.) But an analysis of 200 million years of history for marine clams found that vulnerability to extinction runs in…

I’m reviewing a book by philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith entitled “Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.” (This is not the book review, forthcoming.) Godfrey-Smith makes an excellent…