Urban environments can be evolutionary hotspots, suggests a study in the journal Current Biology that explored why road kill surveys show a sharp decline in bird mortality over the last 30 years. Charles R. Brown, of the University of Tulsa, has been studying cliff swallows in Nebraska since 1982. These birds build clusters of mud […]
Tag Archives | natural selection
Pop music created using natural selection and crowdsourcing
Software that uses Darwinian natural selection and the musical tastes of 7,000 people is well on the way to creating the perfect pop tune, according to evolutionary scientists from Imperial College London. A report on the project appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists set out to test a […]
Revealed: New player in natural selection
The unexpected discovery of a new type of genetic variation suggests that natural selection – the force that drives evolution – is both more powerful and more complex than scientists had previously thought. The finding, published inNature, could help explain how some organisms, including bacterial pathogens, maintain high levels of diversity and adapt rapidly to […]
ADHD A Benefit In The Wild?
A fascinating new study in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology suggests that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might be beneficial to nomadic Kenyan tribesmen in Africa, while possibly leading to malnourishment in their settled cousins. Led by Dan Eisenberg, an anthropologist from Northwestern University, the study looked at occurrences of the ADHD-associated version of the […]