The 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared his progress in solving a problem to that of a mountain climber “compelled to retrace his steps because his progress stopped.”…

What is sex for? When I regularly queried students at the beginning of my course in evolutionary biology, most responded that it was for reproducing. Reasonable enough, but wrong.…

What’s wrong with us? Not us Democrats, Republicans, or Americans. Rather, what’s wrong with our species, Homo sapiens? If human beings are as Hamlet suggested, “noble in reason,…

In 1952, well before developmental biologists spoke in terms of Hoxgenes and transcription factors, or even understood DNA’s structure, Alan Turing had an idea. The famed mathematician…

1 In the beginning it was known as TMM 41450-3. Then things got more personal. Yes, life had already taken to the heavens, long ago in the Carboniferous, eons before TMM 41450-3’s…

The following is an excerpt from Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution by Russell Bonduriansky and Troy Day.The idea that genes encode all the heritable…

The evolution of sexual beauty is an ongoing experiment in every species, including our own. Variation in courtship traits arise and are judged by choosers who quickly relegate most…

Michael J. Ryan, a professor of zoology, didn’t call his forthcoming book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Frog Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), but he sure could have.…

Snuffling through the underbrush, the shaggy little creature wanders through the sylvan night, sticking its nose in one place, then another, seeking the aroma of its soft-bodied dinner.…

Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values,” wrote poet Robinson Jeffers in 1940. “What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine the fleet limbs of the antelope? What…