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Life
Why Human Color Vision Is so Odd
How did our sight evolve to the point where we can see a wide range of colors that other mammals cannot?
Life
Life is more than just proteins and chromosomes, right?
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Life
How Does a Caterpillar Turn into a Butterfly?
To become a butterfly, a caterpillar first digests itself. But certain groups of cells survive, turning the soup into eyes, wings, antennae and other adult structures.
Life
'Impossible' chemistry may reveal origins of life on Earth
Experiments suggest that metabolism could have begun spontaneously on our primordial planet—and that scientists may need to rethink how we define life.
Life
Optimizing Genes with a Genetic Algorithm
In the simplest terms, genetic algorithms simulate a population where each individual is a possible “solution” and let survival of the fittest do its thing.
Life
Epigenetics: The Sins of the Father
The roots of inheritance may extend beyond the genome, but the mechanisms remain a puzzle. As a postdoc in Kerry Ressler’s laboratory at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Brian Dias had spent much of the two years before his son’s birth studying these kinds of questions in mice.
Life
Creationism vs. Evolution: The Debate
Bill Nye and Ken Ham debated the origins of life last night live from the Creationist Museum in Kentucky. The great success of the debate was to inform and raise awareness of how vital science is to our future.
Life
Epigenetics and the Influence of Our Genes
Each mammalian cell has the same genes, yet performs distinct functions. This is achieved by epigenetic control of gene expression; the switching on and switching off of genes. This course will cover the principles of epigenetic control of gene expression, how epigenetic control contributes to cellular differentiation and development, and
Life
Lamarck, Inheritance, and Instinct
Something has always troubled me about Darwin’s theory and even modern revisions of his work – there is still no explanation for instinct. Ethologists call instincts innate releasing mechanisms or IRM, which in layman’s terms means “we’ll use big fancy words because we just don’t know.” The
Life
Bilateral Symmetry in Embryos and Supermodels
Bilateral symmetry is a type of body plan in which an organism has two mirror-image halves along a single axis. The axis of symmetry is the sagittal plane, which passes vertically through the head and body. Each half has one set of sensory organs and appendages: one eye, one ear,
Life
Taboo Biology: Epigenetics
Throughout the twentieth century, one of the strongest taboos in biology was against the inheritance of acquired characteristics, sometimes called Lamarckian inheritance, after the pioneering evolutionary biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). Lamarck proposed that adaptations by plants and animals could be passed on to their offspring. In this respect, Charles Darwin
Life
Evolutionary Theory Needs Revising
The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message
Life
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)
It’s hard to believe that it has taken modern science 200 years to catch up to Lamarck. One of the common threads on Nautis Project has always been the incompleteness of a biological theory of evolution, morphology, and memory. It is these gaps in our knowledge that people like
Life
How Do Pigeons Home?
One of the most interesting of Sheldrake’s proposals from the book Seven Experiments is mobile pigeon lofts. He goes into some detail in the book but he also brings up the topic during the Glorious Accident round table discussion. In this clip, he challenges some of the prevailing views
Life
What's Next in Human Evolution?
A friend recently asked me, "What's the next step in human evolution?" As much as I have read about evolutionary biology and psychology, I had never considered this. I think there are a few reasons for this. These reasons are outlined below: 1. Evolution does not