Humans were aware of the cycles that govern our lives long before we understood them. The most obvious cycle is the day/night cycle. Objects floating in space, or orbiting other objects under the law of gravity, have a natural tendency to spin on their own axis. There are exceptions, but our planet is not one … Read more

The human body abounds with what, in one sense; we could call imperfections but, in another sense, should be seen as inescapable compromises resulting from our long ancestral history of descent from other kinds of animal. Imperfections are inevitable when ‘back to the drawing board’ is not an option — when improvements can be achieved … Read more

Just as ants and their subterranean fellow-travelers lose their wings underground, so numerous different kinds of animals that live in the depths of dark caves where there is no light have reduced or lost their eyes, and are, as Darwin himself noted, more or less completely blind. The word ‘troglobite’ has been coined for an … Read more

Mutations can be neutral for various reasons. The DNA code is a ‘degenerate code. This is a technical term meaning that some code ‘words’ are exact synonyms of each other. When a gene mutates into one of its synonyms, you might as well not bother to call it a mutation at all. Indeed, it isn’t … Read more

An architect designs a great cathedral. Then, through a hierarchical chain of command, the building operation is broken down into separate departments, which break it down further into sub-departments, and so on until instructions are finally handed out to individual masons, carpenters and glaziers, who go to work until the cathedral is built, looking pretty … Read more

The same is true of most of the flowers we are aware of — probably all the flowers that are colored anything other than green and whose smell is anything more than just vaguely plant-like. Not all the work was done by insects — for some flowers the pollinators that did the initial selective breeding … Read more