"The placenta is this amazing, complex structure and it's unique to mammals, but we've had no idea what its evolutionary origins are," says Julie Baker, PhD, assistant professor of genetics at…

In research published in Nature, researchers at Rockefeller University and the University of Tokyo state that insects have adopted a strategy to detect odors that is radically different from those of…

Nice blog today on mutualisms by Olivia Judson who writes the Wild Side blog/column for the New York Times (I seem to be writing a lot about writers for the NY Times these days ... not sure what is…

The Human Genome Project revealed that only a small fraction of the 3 billion “letter” DNA code actually instructs cells to manufacture proteins, the workhorses of most life processes. This has…

In the first experiment of its kind conducted in nature, a University of British Columbia evolutionary biologist has come up with strong evidence for one of Charles Darwin’s cornerstone ideas –…

Higher organisms do not have a “cost of complexity” — or slowdown in the evolution of complex traits — according to a report by researchers at Yale and Washington University in Nature. Biologists…

Nathaniel Abraham got a job as a biology post-doc at Woods Hole and then chose to disclose that he wasn't necessarily hip to every little aspect of evolutionary biology - like the whole evolution…

Writing in PNAS, a group of researchers says they have determined the first pervasive 'rule' of evolution - that animals become increasingly more complex. Examining the last 550 million years of the…

I don't often see bacteriophage ecology and evolution papers in the open source literature, but there is a nice one in next month's American Naturalist (occasionally Am Nat selects papers for open…

The news keeps coming in, and examples of how real science works (as opposed to make believe creationism or so-called intelligent design) are beginning to get so numerous that it is hard to imagine…