Articles tagged "evolution"

A rumor gets halfway around the world, while the truth is still in peer review.

If anything, this new discovery only deepens the mystery.

Close encounters with Pakicetus attocki, the so-called "first whale," which was actually a four-legged, wolf-sized land animal that lived 50 million years ago.

Courtesy of the female great tits.

They at least seem to knew humans can't see them stealing food in the dark.

Ants are one of the most social creatures on earth. Unsurprisingly, they learn to "talk" at an early age.

How do you feel to know that you, over millions of years, have descended from a fuzzy little bug eater?

Studies suggest couch potatoes have lower sperm counts. Evolution at work.

500 million years ago, a stupid sea-going invertebrate had a genetic accident.

Which weird, rage-inducing evolutionary strings does the Black Friday phenomenon pluck?

Remember that time you, like, totally owned that Zizek thesis in art semiotics? Or that degree you got in post-reunification Germanic studies? Or how you were – no big deal, guys – a National Merit Finalist? Yeah, well, hate to break it to you Einste…

The "cannibalism" internet hole is full of all kinds of awful shit. Surprise. Most of it probably won't actually give much insight into this week's awful cannibalism story however, that of NYPD officer "Gilberto Valle":http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/…

Imagine that you are blind, deaf, and without any memory whatsoever. No long-term or short-term memory; you can’t even remember the last step you took. You may have been in this room a million times, finding your way around a basic obstacle a million…

I don't particularly like being shy. I don't think it benefits me in any way, whether in terms of regular ol' evolutionary selection or in terms of post-nature meta-survival (broad-spectrum human fulfillment, say). Shyness in humans is undesirable to…

The most beautiful aspect of science is that it will never be finished. For all of the incredible breakthroughs that we've celebrated, and all of the millions of papers and books filled with bright research and knowledge out there, there will always

Here's a recipe for video views: Take Bill Nye, famously "well-spoken defender of science":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/7/28/beautiful-bill-nye-patiently-explains-the-nature-of-science-to-fox-news, and have him tell creationists that they're hosi…

A lot of blowhards out there who like to speak on evolutionary theory have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. It should come as no surprise that much of that pap comes from the right, whose leaders, even the "scientific" ones, "love to be…

How violent, really, is shark sex? It's so vicious that to many shark scientists, it's taboo. Researchers fear that talking about it, "writes":http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n15/theo-tait/dont-wear-yum-yum-yellow Juliet Eilperin in _Demon Fish: Travels thr…

No one reading this has the slightest fucking clue what “nature” is, and in 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly proved it. In the paper that introduced the term “shifting baselines,” Pauly described how experts who determined how many fish should b…

Excuse me for sounding like some lame-o, but in the past week or so I've been reminded how important friends are. After cashing in a bunch of favors, moving out of my apartment (and helping some folks move out of theirs), and more than one instance o…

There was a time where humans had to remember everything and, what's more, had to store those memories in their flimsy brains. Remembering things, like, say, where game congregates to drink (and be killed by your arrow) or which snake is the one that…

Conventional wisdom makes a big deal about the cultural gap that sets humans apart from apes – that giant chasm between nut-smashing and Beethoven.

Motherboard "covered fairly recently":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/4/13/as-if-bed-bugs-weren-t-bad-enough-already-turns-out-they-re-also-violent-sexual-predators the evolved mating strategy of male bed bugs, which involves said creeps literally s…