Evolution

Changing winter conditions are causing Scotland's wild Soay sheep to get smaller despite the evolutionary benefits of having a large body, researchers report in a study that shows how climate change can trump natural selection. The results highlight how wide-ranging the effects of global climate change can be, adding further complexity to the changes we might expect to see in natural populations in future.

Richard Dawkins interviews Craig Venter for "The Genius of Charles Darwin," the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008.

An aquatic lifestyle imposes serious demands for the organism, and this is true even for the tiniest molecules that form our body. When the ancestors of present marine mammals initiated their return to the oceans, their physiology had to adapt radically to the new medium.

One hundred and fifty years after Charles Darwin proposed that “endless forms” of life, past and present, evolved by natural selection, researchers are still working out what processes generate the variation that natural selection operates on.

How did piranhas — the legendary freshwater fish with the razor bite — get their telltale teeth? Researchers from Argentina, the United States and Venezuela have uncovered the jawbone of a striking transitional fossil that sheds light on this question. Named Megapiranha paranensis, this previously unknown fossil fish bridges the evolutionary gap between flesh-eating piranhas and their plant-eating cousins.

Melvyn Bragg and a panel of scientists debate what Charles Darwin's theory of evolution tells us about ourselves and human society. Filmed in at the Linnean Society - the world's oldest biological society --- in Piccadilly, London.

New evidence underscores the theory of human origin that suggests humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, according to research from the University of Pittsburgh and the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Scientists have discovered a unique beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China. The finding, they say, demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought, and offers important evidence about how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs.

Richard Dawkins interviews Peter Singer for "The Genius of Charles Darwin," the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008.

Charles Darwin wrote about it 150 years ago: animals don't pick their mates by pure chance – it's a process that is deliberate and involves numerous factors. After decades of examining his work, experts agree that he pretty much scored a scientific bullseye, but a very big question is, "What have we learned since then?" asks a Texas A&M University biologist who has studied Darwin's theories.

Richard Dawkins interviews Steven Pinker for "The Genius of Charles Darwin," the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008.

How fast can evolution take place? In just a few years, according to a new study on guppies led by UC Riverside's Swanne Gordon, a graduate student in biology.

Douglas Adams moderates a discussion between Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond. The discussion focuses on attempts to apply darwinian principles and explanations to areas other than biology, such as cosmology, language and psychology, as well as pointing out areas that are less likely to have darwinian explanations. Towards the end, the discussion turns to issues of religion and the psychology of belief and imagination.

As Darwin observed, natural selection leading to adaptation of individuals and populations is occurring gradually and all the time. But over very long spans of time, the major channels of genetic organization, organism form, and the different ways organisms develop arose as outcomes of history-dependent variation that is now channeled, or constrained, within different groups of organisms.

New research indicates that natural selection may shape the human genome much more slowly than previously thought.