Evolution

Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.

Answering three questions can help reveal how the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” fits into modern evolutionary theory.

The computational biologist John Novembre uses our genetic code to rewrite the history of humanity.

How to calculate when a gene’s rate of evolution will slow to a crawl.

How quickly will a gene’s rate of evolution slow to a crawl?

Examine evolution over the course of years or centuries, and you’ll find that it progresses much more quickly than it does over geologic time.

The ancient creatures who first crawled onto land may have been lured by the informational benefit that comes from seeing through air.

Life was long thought to obey its own set of rules. But as simple systems show signs of lifelike behavior, scientists are arguing about whether this apparent complexity is all a consequence of thermodynamics.

Life might have originated in droplets that behave surprisingly like living cells.