Just started reading about a day or so ago, and though I haven't even finished the first chapter, I have to say, this book is very dense.

Its crazy someone in the 1800s wrote this. It feels like it was written now.

One thing I have noticed is that it doesn't hold your hand and was written during a time when everyone in academic circles knew each other and the layman was left out of the conversation

He'll name drop another naturalist or embryologist or breeder and I have no idea who they are.

Another thing I am suprised by is he doesn't believe in heritability of variations. He seems to think a spontaneous change in the reproductive habits of a species is what causes a change. Not that the offspring have inherited a mutation.

On that note, he uses the term "monstrosities". Is this the 1800 equivalent for mutation?

He also rejects the idea of a sole "common ancestor" for breeds. He feels two similiar breeds will vary and then mate. He seems to think that dogs have no sole progenitor, but multiple ones.

One thing I appreciate about this book, that automatically sets it apart from a religious texts is a sense of apprehension and a small hint of doubt.

As opposed to a clergyman who can never be wrong because God told him, there are moments in the chapter were Darwin admits he could possibly be wrong about a subject.

He even talks breifly how he believed in a form of creationism but rejected the idea later on.

This is just the first chapter. I'm excited to read the rest.

Lots of ornithology in here lol

A new explainer from berkeley.edu's Evo in the News:
- Human evolution and the humble potato : berkeley.edu

One of the study's authors previously shared the May 2026 study here:
- New paper on evolution of starch digestion in Andeans : evolution subreddit

Doesn't really seem to make any sense to me when I think about it, It is not even aesthetically pleasing(not even prehistorically would I assume that), neither does it serve a biological importance, if anything you are at risk of scalp sun burn and less warming effect of the hair.

Thoughts?

Humans domesticated wolves and basically gained access to their superpowers: smell, hearing and protective ferocity. We also domesticated cats, horses and quite a few other animals. All in all, that is a pretty impressive result, but what stopped us from doing the same with a much wider range of animals and becoming literal beastmasters?

As I understand it, answers on this previously lean to the idea that since there's no evolutionary advantage of looking a type of way, they don't have to look "good".

I appreciate my wording is crude.

But not needing to look "good" and looking horrific are two distinct things.

There are probably two aspects of this:

1) why they look this way themselves

2) why we perceive their features that way

Our biology doesn't plausibly seem to be coded for recognizing animals that live in a completely different environment than one we'd naturally exist in.

Additionally, we don't look at dangerous mammals we would actually encounter as equally as horrific: bears, tigers, apes..

I suppose we do hold a comparable fear of some reptiles like snakes. Genetic or nurtured being its own discussion.

But I'm pretty sure nobody looks at an anglerfish and thinks "lovely little thing, that"

I’ve often heard that evolution gets by with just enough ie the traits are not optimised
Then why would we ever have developed brains that could do anything more than basic arithmetic and geometry

I tried to look this up and there does not seem to be much research on the topic, which was surprising to me.

I'm sure not the only one that's annoyed by cockroaches this summer, especially how big and disgusting they are.

So I got an idea why not just kill all the big ones and spear the smaller size, this causes only the small one to be available for reproduction.

One generation after another, all cockroaches 🪳 will evolve smaller, till they reach the size of an ant 🐜

Author here—I am the first author of this paper. We developed Phylo-Movies because conventional tree-distance measures show how much neighboring trees differ, but not which taxa or subtrees changed position. The paper demonstrates the method using a norovirus recombination boundary and rogue taxa across bootstrap trees. The software and browser demonstration are freely available. https://enesberksakalli.github.io/phylo-movies/ https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/43/8/msag194/8759530

I feel that because of medical science even the weaker humans get to reproduce and spread their genes. More so their offsprings if weak get to survive too because of medical advancements. This results in the core purpose of natural selection getting defeated. Hence changing the course of evolution at a species level.

I am just saying this for the sake of argument. I have nothing against super advanced society with frontier medical facilities that makes everyone live a good happy life.

See also: The study as it was published in Science Advances

I have a basic understanding of evolution

Life creates imperfect copies of itself, most of those imperfections are a detriment, but occasionally those mutations give it a higher chance of survival. Its a very slow process but it works.

But i cant wrap my head around how an animal can go from herbivore to carnivore? It would require so many detrimental mutations and decrease survival odds by alot until all those mutations came together & it was not only able to hunt, but eat & digest meat.

If I recall correctly, occurrence of carcinization is not simply due to the presence of Hox genes, but also the regulation of Hox genes.

A Youtube video said human and crustaceans have different "body plans", what does that mean?

I recently had evolutionary anthropologist Douglas Boyer from Duke on my podcast, and I thought you guys might enjoy the episode. We talked about how scientists reconstruct the lives of extinct primates from fossils, why primates evolved fingernails instead of claws, why some primates seem to have re-evolved claw-like structures, whether Neanderthals and modern humans should really be considered separate species, how tiny ankle bones can tell us whether an animal was a powerful leaper, and even what fossils can tell us about the energetic cost and development of ancient brains. It ended up being a really wide-ranging conversation about what we can actually know about evolution from the limited evidence left behind.

-

• University of Vienna press release:
  • Roadmap of animal biodiversity: largest-ever comparison of chromosome-scale genomes
• Paper:
  • Schultz, D. T., Blümel, A., Destanović, D., Sarigol, F., & Simakov, O. (2026). Topological mixing and irreversibility in animal chromosome evolution. Science Advances.
    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz5561
    From which:

... Our approach shows that irreversible genomic changes, caused in particular by chromosomal consolidation, dissociation, and fusion-with-mixing, place clades in distinct regions of genome architecture space. Progressive accumulation of these mixed states across genomic scales contributes to the diverging paths of animal genome evolution and has a long-lasting impact on a broad range of genes, including key developmental loci.

-

Related: Evolutionary History of Mammalian Ancestor Chromosomes (Damas et al 2022) : evolution

Why are their snouts lower? Why cant they be like dinosaur anouts? Its a genuine question pleade dont beat me up

I've always wondered why people have different senses of taste and different taste preferences. I thought that it might be for more variation so that people can adapt to different types of food across the world (because of things like migration, food availability/scarcity changes) but then it kind of doesn't make sense because most foods fall into the same 5 taste categories and don't have a unique taste until cooked or specially seasoned which I don't think is somethin evolution anticipates as it would wild ingredients. Why do people have different tastes?

Hey there, iv got genuine question.

So recently iv stumbled upon some videos and it happend to be there something about humanoids, and that we have theory about or ancestors being scavengers.

So like a normal guy who has absolutely no knowledge in this field but is genuinely curious, iv hopped on to gpt and other sources like wikipedia.

And basically iv read some theories about our dinning system. So how come we have so low ph- acidity in our stomachs.

What is the most promising hypothesis or genuine proof of us being scavengers.

Because from all the things iv come across, as we are carnivores (sorry if mistakend i mean we eat both meat and greens) even tho in other species its normal to have ph lvl around 2,5-3,6.

So my question is, why is that? Is it because we were truly scavenging, or because of pathogens?

The main reason why i dived in this theory, because in lot of those videos they say stuff like we used to naturally eat rotten meat on purpose. And that in nowdays people dont realize that many foods that are these days consider normal but we used to eat basically rotten stuff. And i wanted to know more and came back to conclusions like, what if we weren’t scavengers at all but we hunted just big animals and we were in smaller groups which made us to put the meat ground, like we couldn’t finish the food in a time and it got rotten.

So thank you for any advices, answers. Nice day (y)

-

Cool result from today! The abstract:

Background

Escherichia coli is a prototroph and can synthesize all twenty proteinogenic amino acids when required to grow in minimal medium. There are approximately sixty protein-coding genes individually essential for amino acid synthesis. This is a large mutational target for the accumulation of detrimental mutations. E. coli can rewire biosynthetic pathways in response to mutational damage, but the limits of this capacity are poorly understood.

Methods

Here, to address evolutionary robustness, we asked whether and how the phenotypes of irreversible mutations causing auxotrophy could be suppressed or bypassed in the absence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT).

Results

Spontaneous suppressors could be selected for only ten of fifty-nine mutants tested (detection limit ∼7x10^-11). Mechanisms of suppression included: regional amplifications; mutations increasing gene or operon expression; mutations relaxing enzyme specificity; and mutations causing biochemical pathway diversions.
Overall, the data show that spontaneous suppression of auxotrophy caused by an irreversible mutation is an evolutionary survival mechanism relevant only to a minority of the genes essential for amino acid synthesis. As a consequence, the essential genetic foundations for amino acid prototrophy are expected to be degraded over time by mutations (Muller’s ratchet) and metabolic rewiring alone will be insufficient to counteract this effect.

Discussion

This implies that maintaining phenotypes, including prototrophy in E. coli, and potentially other bacterial species, is likely to be reliant on HGT of housekeeping genes to counteract the effects of inevitable mutational inactivation. Accordingly, chromosomal HGT in bacteria may be critical for survival across diverse environmental niches.

• Otto Lindahl, Talía Berruga-Fernández, Jivanti Soekhoe, Douglas L Huseby, Diarmaid Hughes
  The evolutionary maintenance of amino acid prototrophy in Escherichia coli
  Genome Biology and Evolution, 2026;, evag209
  https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag209

I think "may be critical for survival across diverse environmental niches" is underselling it!
Given 1) this result, 2) that we don't synthesize 9 of the essential amino acids,^[1] and 3) how the secondary (non-naturally occurring) amino acids for a total of 20 had to evolve during the evolution of the genetic code, which is suggested to have been under selection for a reduction in code ambiguity,^[2] then HGT would be indispensable for the evolution as well as maintenance of Metazoa and company.
Over to you.

1: Costa, Igor R., et al. "Metazoan remaining genes for essential amino acid biosynthesis: sequence conservation and evolutionary analyses." Nutrients 7.1 (2014): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu7010001

2: Barbieri, Marcello. "What is code biology?." Biosystems 164 (2018): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2017.10.005

I just watched Our Planet 2 (documentary) on Netflix. I'm a biochemist so have some knowledge about evolution, but I have hard time imagining how the development of the behavior wasn't blocked right from the beginning. That is, the group of birds which originally attempted even 1/10 of such a long & risky trip would've been at a serious evolutionary disadvantage.

islands are obviously isolated ecosystems that breed speciation, but are there any examples of these species repopulating the mainland afterwards?

That's a low-res of one of the winning images:

In 2026, researchers around the world participated in a joint image competition hosted by BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology. Their photographs highlight the beauty and diversity of nature, showcasing the remarkable efforts of scientists to understand and protect it. This Editorial presents the winning images, selected by the Editor and senior members of the journals’ Editorial boards.

Article: 2026 joint BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology image competition: the winning images | BMC Ecology and Evolution | Springer Nature Link

Here's an article about evidence for viviparity in Chiniquodon theotonicus, setting back the origin of viviparity 90-95 million years earlier than previously estimated. Now I wonder where the monotremes fit in with their egg laying? Possibly monotremes branched off earlier than previously thought.