Last week I described how a boulder-sized meteorite exploded in the skies over Murchison, Australia, forty years ago. The remarkable mix of organic compounds discovered in samples of…

The genetic toolkit that animals use to build fins and limbs is the same genetic toolkit that controls the development of part of the gill skeleton in sharks, according to research published in PNAS…

As the U.S. Southwest grew warmer from 18,700 to 10,000 years ago, juniper trees vanished from what is now the Mojave Desert, robbing packrats of their favorite food. Now, University of Utah…

The other day I posted on my FaceBook profile that I better hurry up to finish my presentation on epigenetic inheritance. One of my friends commented: “I have no idea what that means, but good luck…

The Oyster's Garter ("Science served wet and salty" - and I'm sure you can take that to mean whatever you want) is hosting the latest, greatest edition of Carnival of Evolution. Read about genetic…

     In the summer of 1981, a colleague at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountainview, California, gave me a small black stone wrapped in aluminum foil that changed the course of my…

UC Berkeley Paleontologist Kevin Padian (also president of the National Center for Science Education) reviews Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True in PLoS Biology. While he praises the book for…

I recently saw W D Hamilton’s 1970 paper “Geometry for the Selfish Herd” described as “a classic in its own right.” As a long-time bibliophile this made it irresistible, but I was also intrigued by…

    One of the earliest scientific speculations about the origin of life was Alexander Oparin’s proposal in 1924 that life began as jelly-like blobs he called coacervates. Oparin knew that…

30 Days of Evolution Blogging - The Finish Line Show Me The Science Month Day 30 Installment 30 To show that evolution is alive and well, back in January I decided to engage in a little stunt…