Tag: species
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Patterns. Scarily visible…
How do the large-scale patterns we observe in evolution arise? A paper in the journal Evolution argues that many of them are a type of statistical bias caused by our unavoidably recent viewpoint looking back into the past. For example, the animals appear in the fossil record about 550 million years ago, in an enormous…
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Luck... Chance... Gods...
Its mostly luck, which determined the success of a person in life, according to a new research. [1] It is mostly luck which determined reproductive success. [2] Its mostly luck which determines the survivability of a species. [3] In a world of chance, we insist on believing that it is us who determine our future.…
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Mammoth extinct. Resurrected. Life and death.
Scientists are one step closer to cloning a woolly mammoth, thanks to the results of a new autopsy conducted on a remarkably preserved specimen of the species discovered last year. The 40,000-year-old mammoth, nicknamed "Buttercup," was found in permafrost on the remote Siberian island of Maly Lyakhovsky. When scientists cut into the carcass, its fresh-looking…
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Species, definitions, science. Towards nothing...
An old bat specimen. Re-examined. Is it one species? Or seven species? An analysis of a museum's bones collections seems to discover issues with the categorization of bats in species. (1) The species definition problem is an old one. The definition-of-anything is actually an old problem in general. We all rely on our definitions. And…
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Africa, Neanderthals, parents. The lost wisdom...
Call it humanity's unexpected U-turn. One of the biggest events in the history of our species is the exodus out of Africa some 65,000 years ago, the start of Homo sapiens' long march across the world. Now a study of southern African genes shows that, unexpectedly, another migration took western Eurasian DNA back to the…
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