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Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI
...genome is no blueprint or algorithm. It is something else. The Old View Given that it’s the product of around 4 billion years of evolution, perhaps it’s not surprising that...
The Thoughts of a Spiderweb
...and Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saint Andrews, proposed a bold answer to the question. They argued in a review paper, published in the journal Animal...
With ‘Downsized’ DNA, Flowering Plants Took Over the World
Compact genomes and tiny cells gave flowering plants an edge over competing flora. This discovery hints at a broader evolutionary principle. When people consider evolutionary events related to the origin...
Too Small for Big Muscles, Tiny Animals Use Springs
...the mechanical properties of their body’s structural materials like loaded springs. Evolution’s ingenuity in achieving such performance anticipated the designs that humans would eventually invent for their own tools and...
DNA Analysis Reveals a Genus of Plants Hiding in Plain Sight
...of the original naturalists. The rising importance of the theory of evolution to biology altered the purpose of taxonomy. Taxonomy began simply as a way of naming and cataloging organisms...
How Equality and Inequality Shape the Birds and the Bees
Two dynamic, seemingly opposing forces likely played an important role in the evolution of reproduction and child rearing in social animals like bees and humans. Before tackling this month’s puzzle,...
A Rapid End Strikes the Dinosaur Extinction Debate
...guide the post-apocalyptic evolution of surviving species — not to drive the extinction itself. Quanta spoke with Hull about that cataclysm — often abbreviated as the K-T extinction — her...
What Other Coronaviruses Tell Us About SARS-CoV-2
...bind effectively, making it harder to produce severe infections. Such evolution by deletion is actually a common feature of these viruses. A deletion of part of the spike gene and...
Random Search Wired Into Animals May Help Them Hunt
...that evolution may have equipped nervous systems to spontaneously generate a foundational movement pattern, a solution that works better than any other strategy for a blind search. The idea has...