Evolution Talk

Evolution by natural selection can build complex features through small, incremental changes. But can it build an eye?

Caves hide many things. Be it shards of glass, arrowheads... or bones. It's to whom these bones might have belonged to which often leads us on a path to great discoveries... and forgotten 'cousins'.

Consider this a 'lost episode' of Evolution Talk. In it I talk with Stephanie Keep of BiteScis.org about the origins and misconceptions around the term 'survival of the fittest'.

In 1811 , or 1812, a young girl by the name of Mary Anning, along with her little brother, happened upon an incredible find while digging around the cliffs of Lyme Regis in England. It was a skull. A very large skull.

It's safe to say, and very few would disagree, that without Rosalind Franklin the double helix structure would not have been discovered when it was, nor perhaps by the same team of discoverers.

Way back in Episode 30 I stepped into a time machine and traveled back to 1869 in order to interview Charles Darwin. This time around I brought someone forward in time... his wife Emma Darwin.

Convergent evolution has shown us that nature will find similar solutions under similar conditions. So too might it be on other planets. Life might not look that much different that it does here

A cladogram will show those animals that share similar form and structures. It's not about animals which have evolved from one another. In this episode we are going to look at clades and cladistics. We will also create a cladogram... an audio cladogram.

Jonathan Tweet has authored a very remarkable book for children. He wasn't just trying to make evolution and its concepts easier to understand for kids in elementary school, Jonathan was shooting for an even younger audience. The result is the book 'Grandmother Fish'.

There are some who say that evolution by natural selection, at least when it applies to you and I, is no longer a driving force. The argument is that we are no longer evolving and that we've pushed natural selection aside and taken the reign of our own development.