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Very intresting question. The problem is that animal intelligence is hard to measure not only for scientists, but probably also for the potential mate. Paradoxically, that is why selection for intelligence, if it occurred, may be very strong. One has to be smart in order to recognise smart behaviour, so preference and preferred feature are strongly ...

Surely it would be even more beneficial for plants to be black instead of red or green, from an energy absorption point of view. And Solar cells are indeed pretty dark. But, as Rory indicated, higher energy photons will only produce heat. This is because the chemical reactions powered by photosynthesis require a only certain amount of energy, and any ...

I believe it is because of a trade off between absorbing a wide range of photons and not absorbing too much heat. Certainly this is a reason why leaves are not black - the enzymes in photosynthesis as it stands would be denatured by the excess heat that would be gained. This may go some of the way towards explaining why green is reflected rather than red ...

He formulated his theory after travelling the world aboard the Beagle, here's the route! He found the Galapagos Islands particularly inspiring, 'The natural history of this archipelago is very remarkable: it seems to be a little world within itself.' This is a more detailed account of his relationship with the Galapagos islands, and there is also a ...

To get a non-circular answer to why humans and other mammals have only two sexes, it's helpful to take a look at our evolutionary history. While mammals possess several adaptations to a terrestrial life cycle, including internal fertilization and gestation, which require substantial anatomic specialization between males and females, these are all secondary ...

I just wanted to add that although we are pretty confident that domestication of wolves created domestic dogs in pretty short order. In addition to the fact that they can still interbreed and the taxonomical resemblence of dogs to wolves and finally the genome sequence, probably the most awesome evidence is the domestication of the silver fox. Russian ...

There is quite a fun article here which discusses the colours of hypothetical plants on planets around other stars. Stars are classified by their spectral type which is dictated by their surface temperatures. The Sun's is relatively hot, and it's spectral energy distribution peaks in the green region of the spectrum. However the majority of stars in the ...

According to Serpell, 1995 (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=I8HU_3ycrrEC, page 8), wolf bones in association with human bones have been found from as early as the middle pleistocene (126,000–781,000 years ago). I think we're talking about more than a few centuries here :) It's still relatively little in comparison to naturally selected evolution, but ...

Galápagos islands are one of few islands with a unique fauna and flora. This can only happen when the distance to other land is great enough, and when the island exists long enough that flora and fauna could grow (volcano islands are sterile for a long time). Now Galápagos is even more unique because it is comprised of several islands that are distant ...

Well first of all I don't know if natural selection favors larger animals - most of the living things in the world are single celled. Still there are advantages to being larger. I don't know if I can list them all! In no particular order: 1) Living things that are large are more metabolically efficient. The amount of food required goes as a 3/4 power ...

I want to point out that Darwin did not notice about the finches as everybody thinks until the captain of the Beagle (Robert Fitz Roy) pointed that to him. Also it was after a lifetime of collecting evidences not only from his voyages but from experiments in his own house and contributions from colleagues that he developed his theories, many years after his ...

How about EWS-FLI1 and other oncofusion proteins? One could argue that cancer progression is as close to viewing "evolution in real time" (as you say) as possible.

I know nothing about biology however I did watch an amazing PBS documentary on cuttlefish that I think is fairly relevent. From http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/kings-of-camouflage.html NARRATOR: During mating, males outnumber the females, sometimes 10 to one. And they're all looking for the chance to pass on their genes. While a female lays eggs ...

Unless you're living on an island! If you're reasonably large but got stuck on an island for a long time, you will get smaller. This phenomenon (which also goes the other way - if you're small you tend to get bigger if stuck on an island) is called insular dwarfism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_dwarfism

@emanuele you seem to be asking why there are only 2 sexes for animals, in contrast to fungi which can have many sexes or maybe bacteria which have mobile sex - the ability to donate genetic information can be acquired or lost. Some animals - worms and fish for instance are hemaphrodites - they can accept sperm or donate them to produce offspring. Fungi ...

From the following free review: Here we review some of the successful strategies in creating protein diversity and the more recent progress in directed protein evolution in a wide range of scientific disciplines and its impacts in chemical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural sciences. Quoting three examples, but the article has much more: ...

Great question! A lot of things affect how quickly a population or species can adapt to a new environment, including population size, mutation rate, generation time, standing genetic diversity, and selective pressure. The diversity of life encompasses practically all combinations of those variables. A bacterial population might very well contain enough ...

There are two factors at play here. First is the balance between how much energy a plant can collect and how much it can use. It is not a problem of too much heat, but too many electrons. If it were a question of heat, a number of flowers selected for their black pigmentation would have their petals cooked off. ;) If a plant does not have enough water, is ...

I may suggest to give a look to game theory based model and their generalization from homogenous spatial diatribution to network like model. An easy review can be found in Martin A. Nowak's Evolutionary Dynamics (Harvard press 2006). In particular you can see the classical Moran process as an evolutionary graph game going on a complete graph with identical ...

Many dog breeds went through genetic bottlenecks about 200 years ago. Many of today's breeds either did not exist a couple to few hundred years ago or looked rather different than the breed looks today. It doesn't take long to change the characteristics when selective breeding occurs. One may need to consider the co-evolution of Homo sapiens and Canis ...