Tag: Darwin

  • 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.

    3 minutes
    Juan Perez-Mercader
  • Nation & World

    Eden as a storyteller’s paradise

    A conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Stephen Greenblatt on his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.”

    6 minutes
    Stephen Greenblatt and Dean Robin Kelsey chat about Greenblatt's new book "The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve" in the lobby of Harvard Global Support Services.
  • Nation & World

    Reading shapes

    A team of Harvard researchers has demonstrated that a shared developmental mechanism in songbirds is responsible for generating tremendous variability in their beaks, and is also a control on what kind variation can be produced.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Evolution in real time

    After 26 years of workdays spent watching bacteria multiply, Richard Lenski has learned that evolution doesn’t always occur in steps so slow and steady that change can’t be observed.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The whys of religion vs. evolution

    University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne says that dysfunction within American society promotes high levels of religious belief that in turn blocks general acceptance of evolutionary theories.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership

    Paul Lawrence, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, offers an integrated explanation of both human behavior and leadership using a scientific approach — and Darwin, too! — to illustrate how good, bad, and misguided leadership are natural to the human condition.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Passion and the flowering plant

    The Arnold Arboretum’s new director, William “Ned” Friedman, has been intrigued by plants’ structure and origin — and captivated by their beauty — for three decades.

    4 minutes
  • 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.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Sobering poems, more sobering oration mark PBK

    Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) chapter first met in 1781, two years before the end of the Revolutionary War.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Evolution explored from all angles

    From humanity’s close relationship to chimpanzees to the missing link between land and sea creatures, the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) has capped off a year celebrating Darwin and “On the Origin of Species” with a new exhibit that puts evolution front and center.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Performance rings old bones with sounds of ‘selection’

    The Harvard Museum of Natural History’s galleries rang with music Tuesday evening (April 28) as the facility’s fossils made room for musicians performing seven original classical pieces written in honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Culture skews human evolution

    The rise of agriculture 10,000 years ago meant the end of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for which human beings had been optimized by millions of years of evolution and the beginning of an era where culture encourages habits unhealthy for us and for the world around, with uncertain evolutionary outcomes.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Watching evolution in real time

    In 1831, the young Charles Darwin set off on the H.M.S. Beagle, a Royal Navy sloop bound for detailed surveys of South America. He took with him the first volume of the massive trilogy “Principles of Geology” by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. (He had the other volumes sent later.)

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Darwin’s empathy, imagination highlighted

    On Feb. 12, the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Much was made of his key idea, natural selection, and how it still resonates and informs science in the 21st century.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Two reasons to fete Darwin

    Small is beautiful. Small may also be powerful. Judging from a copy on display at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the book that changed the world is only 8 inches high and 5 1/2 inches wide.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A single gene leads yeast cells to cooperate against threats

    An ingenious social behavior that mobilizes yeast cells to cooperate in protecting each other from stress, antibiotics, and other dangers is driven by the activity of a single gene, scientists report this week in the journal Cell. The cooperating cells use the same gene, dubbed FLO1, as a marker for detecting “cheaters,” cells that try…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Biologists remember landmark theory

    Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    First orchid fossil puts showy blooms at some 80 million years old

    Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have coexisted with dinosaurs.

    4 minutes