Without doubt, the most intriguing evolutionary pressure of all is sexual selection. The how and why behind our choice of mates, and how evolution hasshaped our reproductive organs to achieve reproductive success, provide some fascinating insights into nature at work. An elegant demonstration of the contribution of sexual selection to brain evolution can be seen […]
Humans are much more perceptive than other primates (well, some of us anyway), but the list of genes known to be implicated in humanity’s separation from the other apes is a short one. In fact, the genes controlling the development of the human brain almost always turn out to be nearly identical to those in […]
Researchers measuring levels of carbon 13 – a byproduct of photosynthesis – in deep-sea core samples going back 205 million years have identified a sharp rise in oxygen levels about 50 million years ago. The increase in oxygen levels gave mammals the evolutionary boost they needed to dominate the planet, says researcher Paul Falkowski, from […]
Researchers from the University of Washington and Harvard University have turned up some interesting findings about possible realities based on math modeling the beginnings of the Universe. Andreas Karch (UW) and Lisa Randall from Harvard set out to model how the Universe was arranged right after the big bang, and then watch how the cosmos […]
How complex and physiologically remarkable structures such as the human eye could evolve has long been a question that has puzzled biologists. But in research reported this week in Current Biology, the evolutionary history of a critical eye protein has revealed a previously unrecognized link between certain components of sophisticated vertebrate eyes – like those […]
A research team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, led by Bruce T. Lahn, has uncovered some fascinating genetic pointers to the human brain’s evolution. Their findings, in the journal Science, relate to sequence variations in two genes that regulate the size of the brain in humans. Interestingly, the major variants in these genes arose […]
Some regions of the human genome have been hotspots for acquiring duplicated DNA sequences, but only at specific time-points during evolution. Researchers say that long periods of genomic stasis, in regard to the accretion of duplicated DNA fragments, are “punctuated” by relatively brief episodes of duplicative activity. The study, appearing in Genome Research, is the […]
A disease you are suffering from could be the result of your great-grandmother being exposed to a toxin. Washington State University researchers reached this controversial conclusion after finding that environmental toxins can alter the activity of an animal’s genes in a way that is transmitted through at least four generations after the exposure. Their discovery […]
How much do females really care about their mate’spenis size? A new study has shown that for some fish species, females prefer males with larger sexual organs, and actually choose them for mating. But biologist Brian Langerhans, from Washington University in St. Louis, said that this does not exclude males with an average-sized sex organ, […]
The genes that control brain development evolved much more rapidly in humans than in other mammals because of natural selection processes unique to the human lineage says an article appearing in the journalCell. “Humans evolved their cognitive abilities not due to a few accidental mutations, but rather, from an enormous number of mutations acquired though […]
