Natural History of the Present
Rob Brooks – Evolutionary Biologist & Author
Why would an otherwise healthy animal stop reproducing? Natural selection usually favours genes that elevate reproductive success because the very act of reproduction is how genes proliferate. So adaptations that involve self-limited reproduction call for unusual evolutionary explanations. Sterile worker…
This is a new and, hopefully, regular kind of post. Shamelessly imitating Jason Collins’ excellent “Week of links” posts over at Evolving Economics. I’ll list some news items and interesting reads I have encountered for the first time during the…
Becoming a parent isn’t easy. Okay, conceiving can be far too easy. But I mean all that stuff about nappies and midnight feeds, and the germs they bring back from daycare, and trying to understand school newsletters. That’s the difficult…
This weekend I gained a grudging appreciation for Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Governator, not the Terminator. Having watched Arnie’s political rise and fall from afar, he always seemed an odd chimera. Lines he’d delivered as the Terminator retrofitted to an ideology…
Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature. Thus concludes the abstract of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that considers the…
The poor old placenta. It really doesn’t get much public attention. And yet it does a crucially important job – acting as the interface between the mother’s blood supply and that of her developing foetus. Every molecule of glucose, oxygen…
How important is penis size? Authors from the Australian National University, Monash and La Trobe provide the most complete answer yet: the size of a flaccid penis can significantly affect how attractive a man’s body is to women. Writing in…
Grant-writing season is finally over for Australian academics. Actually, grant writing season is never over, but with the deadlines now having passed for the ARC Discovery grants and Discovery Early Career Research Awards and the NH&MRC Project Grants, most academics…
What do you know? The creative force behind science’s favourite Facebook site is … a woman. Holy mother of Christ. Just over a year ago, Elise Andrew, then a biology student at the University of Sheffield, created a Facebook page,…
Some aspects of the natural world are so commonplace that we mistake them for essential truths. This is especially true of the fact that the animals we know best, including our own species, usually give birth to near-indistinguishable numbers of…