Tag: Evolution
The Catholic Church succeeded in getting the attention of Catholics, Satanists, and everyone in the vast spiritual spaces in-between on Tuesday after Pope Francis embraced the theories of Evolution and the Big Bang. While he didn’t endorse either theory, he argued that they are not at odds with Catholic teachings, saying “Evolution in nature is […]
It sounds like something out of a clumsy sci-fi movie, but “rangeomorphs” — fractal-shaped organisms which evolved before plants and animals — were very real. The above digital renderings of the obscure sea dwellers were created by scientists Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill and Simon Conway Morris. Rangeomorphs reigned in the Ediacaran era, 575 million years ago, when life was microscopic. They […]
Nearly a decade ago, researchers on the Indonesian island of Flores announced that they had unearthed an extinct, never-before-seen species of human. Standing about three-and-a-half-feet-tall with a grapefruit-sized skull, the remains were classified as Homo Floresiensis and nicknamed the “hobbit.” Heralded as “the most extreme human ever discovered,” the specimen was believed to be crucial […]
Of all the weird things about the variations on anatomical acrobatics that was call “sex,” the uncontrollable grunting, panting and miscellaneous savage noises that come into play are possibly the weirdest. Evolutionarily speaking, what is the purpose of all that noise? To guide the lion straight up into the caveman’s love nest? To traumatize centuries’ worth of […]
Language is constantly changing — if you were to travel just a few decades back in time and tell someone that, say, your boo’s got mad swag when she twerks in those jeggings, they’d look at you like you were batshit (there’s another one) — and that’s just within recent American English. And now, a […]
A couple weeks ago, science informed us that we shared traits with goddamn rat-things. (Radiolab is being a little more diplomatic and calling the creature “shrew-like,” but let’s be real, it’s a goddamn rat.) Now, Radiolab and the American Museum of Natural History are asking us to think of a good name for this ancestor […]
Humans have been indulging in alcohol since the dawn of civilization. No, wait. Earlier! Turns out that humanity’s taste for booze dates back 10 million years, to a common evolutionary ancestor that we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. This is what scientists at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, FL have concluded based on […]
After disparaging rats yesterday, it seems that vitriol was unwise. Today, science just said that humans share some anatomical qualities to a creature that was the size of a rat. We might as well just call ourselves rat people now. After six years of sifting through mammalian family trees, scientists believe that a common ancestor […]
