Exploring Life's Origins: A Virtual Exhibit. Ten Recent Advances in Evolution. By Carl Zimmer Posted 10.26.09 NOVA To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, here's a list—by no means exhaustive—of some of the biggest advances in evolutionary biology over the past decade. These advances include not just a better understanding of how this or that group of species first evolved, but insights into the evolutionary process itself.
In some cases those insights would have given Darwin himself a pleasant jolt of surprise. Ten significant leaps forward in evolution research in the past decade, as chosen and described by noted science writer Carl Zimmer Enlarge Photo credit: (Earth) © NASA; (text) © WGBH Educational Foundation Darwin envisioned natural selection acting so slowly that its effects would be imperceptible in a human lifetime. But in the late 1900s, evolutionary biologists began to detect small but significant changes taking place in a handful of species. Complex eyes have evolved in several different lineages of animals. Tree of Life Web Project. The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny).
Each page contains information about a particular group, e.g., salamanders, segmented worms, phlox flowers, tyrannosaurs, euglenids, Heliconius butterflies, club fungi, or the vampire squid. ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. Talk.Origins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controver. Evolution. Understanding Evolution. The bacteria that changed the world - May, 2017 The make-up of Earth's atmosphere, once the domain of Earth science textbooks, has become an increasingly "hot" news topic in recent decades, as we struggle to curb global warming by limiting the carbon dioxide that human activity produces.
While the changes that humanity has wrought on the planet are dramatic, this isn’t the first time that one species has changed Earth’s atmosphere. Three billion years ago, there was no free oxygen in the atmosphere at all. Life was anaerobic, meaning that it did not need oxygen to live and grow. That all changed due to the evolution of Cyanobacteria, a group of single-celled, blue-green bacteria. Read the rest of the story here | See the Evo in the News archive. The Panda's Thumb.