For many years, scientists pondered the question: how and why do offspring inherit traits from their parents? And key to the answer to that question is another question: what determines an organism’s traits in the first place? The pursuit of these answers ultimately led to the modern field of genetics, which itself is crucial to the study of evolution. This episode, we address just a few key points on this vast topic, with a focus on how our understanding of genetics allows us to interpret the history of evolution on our planet.

In the news: early fruit-eating, giant Australian birds, beaver evolution, and human speech.

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The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome.

Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0