A curious feature of evolution by natural selection is that it depends crucially on events that “almost never” happen. For instance, speciation, the process in which a new species is generated by wandering away from its parent species, is an exceedingly rare event,
You have probably seen video of gazelles being chased across the plain by a predator, and noticed that some of the gazelles are leaping high into the air during their attempts to escape their pursuer. This is called stotting. Why do gazelles
Nor does it depend on the process of natural selection understanding prime numbers. The mindless, uncomprehending process of natural selection can exploit this important property of some numbers without having to understand it at all. For another example: neither bees nor Mother
Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder; it “discovers” and “endorses” and “focuses” reasons over many generations. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales,” a term that has apparently jangled the nerves of more than a few thinkers, who suspect
MacKenzie described Darwin’s idea of Absolute Ignorance being the source of “all the achievements of creative skill” as a “strange inversion of reasoning,” since it turns upside down one of the most “obvious” ideas we have: comprehension is the source of competence. Why do
The most amazing of all is the tenacity of living things, the thousands of ways they have of clinging to life and reproducing, eking out a living against formidable obstacles, thanks to millions of ingenious devices and arrangements, from the convoluted cascades
The genomes that exist today are connected by threads of descent to the genomes of their parents and grandparents and so on, back to the beginning of life on Earth.The Tree of Life, shows how every person is relatively closely related to
How can our personal DNA be so different and yet so similar? A good way to understand this surprising fact is by comparing DNA with the texts of books, and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1962) has given us a little
When a person is made, or when a mouse is made, both embryologies draw upon the same dictionary of genes: the normal vocabulary of mammalian embryologies. The difference between a person and a mouse comes out of the different orders with which
Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! But what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created