The Biologic Podcast

The Paleozoic Era saw the rapid emergence of increasingly complex life forms that filled the sea and the land, but they would all face extinction during the events known as the Great Dying.

Life on Earth is billions of years old. This ancient natural history comes to us in the form of fossils and genetic relationships, revealing the incredible story of the evolution of life.

All populations are subject to perpetual evolution, and Humans are no exception; peer into our distant past and observe the evolutionary history of the Human species.

As all living things are fundamentally related, phylogenetics is the study of these genetic relationships, and the evolutionary history of the many diverse lineages of Earthly life.

When populations groups diverge, whether they're separated geographically, temporally, or behaviorally, they find themselves on the pathway to speciation.

Besides natural selection, evolution is influenced by mechanisms like gene flow, the random walk of genetic drift, and the novelty-generating phenomenon of genetic mutations.

The forces of natural selection remove from the gene pool those lineages too unfit to survive in a given habitat, while those with good health survive to make healthy offspring, and their lineages tend to perpetuate.

A brief introduction to evolution, including its mechanisms, selective pressures, runaway effects, and the fundamental importance of evolution as a guiding force for the perpetuation of life.

Genetic information is complex; there's the gene sequence, the regulation of gene expression, and there are even mechanisms to modify genes, allowing a single gene to produce multiple different proteins.

The gene itself encodes raw information, but this is just the beginning of gene expression, which is a complex, highly-regulated, and tightly-coordinated process.