Featured series 
Tag: Charles Darwin
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Nation & World
Why there might be life out there unlike any on Earth
Researchers create synthetic species without biochemistry, find they operate according to Darwinian evolutionary principles.
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Nation & World
Buck Trible and the case of the mutant ants
Researchers have discovered a huge clue to the century-old mystery of why some ants become workers and others become queens.
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Nation & World
Was Darwin first? Kind of depends
Charles Darwin’s work arose in an era where many were thinking about the source of nature’s variety.
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Nation & World
A new era in the study of evolution
Harvard biologist Jonathan Losos talks about his new book, “Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution.”
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Nation & World
A family of common zeal
Of the many items in a new Radcliffe exhibit devoted to a family of social reformers, one in particular points to the attitudes and assumptions they repeatedly overcame. It’s a…
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Nation & World
Fresh approaches in teaching
Incorporating hands-on, experiential learning with rigorous classroom study is the sort of innovative approach that Harvard has striven to support in recent years, the sort that will play a central role in the Harvard Campaign for Arts and Sciences.
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Nation & World
Darwin takes flight
Arnold Arboretum Director William “Ned” Friedman and freshmen from his “Getting to Know Darwin” seminar went to the home of a pigeon fancier. “Darwin not only wrote about pigeons, he bred them himself,” Friedman said.
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Nation & World
Pecking order
Harvard researchers have found that a new investigation of tissues and signaling pathways in finches’ beaks reveals surprising flexibility in the birds’ evolutionary tool kit.
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Nation & World
Worming out of listening
A freshman seminar helps students to understand Darwin by reading his works and re-creating 10 experiments — including one showing that the wiggly creatures just don’t hear.
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Nation & World
Tailored to fit
The dramatic diversity of columbine flowers can be explained by a simple change in cell shape. To match the pollinators’ probing tongues, the flowers’ cells in floral spurs elongate, driving rapid speciation.
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Nation & World
On Darwin and gender
New website opens a window onto naturalist Charles Darwin’s struggle with the complexities of gender, and illustrates how culture affects science’s vaunted neutrality.
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Nation & World
London School of Economics awards Peter Godfrey-Smith
The London School of Economics and Political Science has awarded Harvard Professor of Philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith the Lakatos Award for outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science.
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Nation & World
What made Darwin first
Evolution icon Charles Darwin rushed “On the Origin of Species” into print to beat the competition, but neglected to credit early thinkers on the subject, who let him know it after the book’s 1859 publication, leading to his appended “Historical Sketch” in later editions.
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Nation & World
Across 160 years, Darwin speaks
The discovery of an unknown 1848 letter by the great naturalist sheds light on a murky part of his life, and on a friendship that eventually went awry.
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Nation & World
On God and evolution
The Harvard Museum of Natural History’s Asa Gray Bicentennial Celebration kicks off with “Re: Design,” a play centered on the correspondence of Gray and Charles Darwin.
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Nation & World
Friedman named director of Arboretum
William “Ned” Friedman, an evolutionary biologist who has done extensive research on the origin and early evolution of flowering plants, has been appointed director of the Arnold Arboretum.
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Nation & World
Re-examining Darwin’s thoughts on species
Radcliffe Fellow James Mallet says Darwin’s idea of speciation as a step in a continuum of differences reflects reality in nature.
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Nation & World
Potent new strategy for mapping animal species shakes up tree of life
Since the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” efforts to trace evolutionary relationships among different classes of organisms have largely relied on external morphological observations.
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Nation & World
A tale of two scholars: The Darwin debate at Harvard
Few people have left a more indelible imprint on Harvard than Louis Agassiz.