One hundred years ago a young teacher, John T. Scopes, went on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for violating a recently enacted state law that forbade the state’s educators “to teach any theory that denies ...

One hundred years ago, a small town in eastern Tennessee captured the attention of the entire country. A biology teacher in Dayton was accused of teaching human evolution to his students — which was ...

Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the evolution of the vertebrate eye. New research suggests that it traces back to a ...

A new study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (MPI-EB) sheds fresh light on one of the most debated concepts in biology: evolvability. The work provides the first ...

As early humans spread from lush African forests into grasslands, their need for ready sources of energy led them to develop a taste for grassy plants, especially grains and the starchy plant tissue ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Directed evolution is a laboratory method that speeds up protein mutations to help create novel cancer and neurodegenerative disorder therapies. In a ...

A fish thought to be evolution’s time capsule just surprised scientists. A detailed dissection of the coelacanth — a 400-million-year-old species often called a “living fossil” — revealed that key ...

Tree genome evolution is a fascinating area in the study of biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Trees, with their distinctive life history traits, such as ...

Researchers found that ancient hominids—including early humans—were exposed to lead throughout childhood, leaving chemical traces in fossil teeth. Experiments suggest this exposure may have driven ...

One hundred years ago, the small town of Dayton, Tenn., became the unlikely stage for one of the most sensational trials in American history. A local substitute teacher, John Scopes, was charged with ...

What is the relationship between scientific knowledge and belief in evolution? I have recently been reviewing data that explores this issue and am sharing what I found. There clearly are some ...