Evolution Talk

A friend of mine recently posed a question on his podcast about carrion plants.   If you don't know what one is, the carrion plant emits an odor that is very similar to rotting flesh. This odor attracts flies which serve to pollinate the flower.   The question posed on my friend's show was how?   How does the plant know to do this?   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com...

We don't know why dogs became man's best friend, but we have some ideas.   And those ideas take us back anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. They are perhaps the perfect visual example when it comes to witnessing the power of the gene pool and how a selection process, whether natural or artificial, can affect it.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produ...

In this episode I want to introduce you to someone.   Actually, this someone is a thing, and this thing wiggled its way through life between two to four billion years ago. Listener, meet LUCA. Your Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA, meet your descendant.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

As a kid I was fascinated by the idea of cavemen.   Of course, all I had to go on were a few poorly produced movies that depicted cavemen battling dinosaurs, which of course never happened.   I even owned an early plastic model of a Cro-Magnon man and woman.   To me the Cro-Magnon were indistinguishable from the Neanderthals.   As far as I knew they both lived in caves, wore skins of the animals t...

Many years ago, in 1977, astronomer and author Carl Sagan offered us the concept of a "Cosmic Calendar" in his book The Dragons of Eden .   It's a fun thought experiment in which you take the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang until now, and represent it as calendar year.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

It's time to look at fossil dating again!  The last episode mentioned two dating methods used to estimate how old the Homo Naledi bones found the Rising Star cave system might be.  To do so, r esearchers used a Uranium-thorium method as well as electron spin resonance, or "ESR".   Let's take a brief look at what each of these entail.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.co...

Quite a few episodes back, I produced a show that looked at a new hominin species discovered in 2013. This history-changing discovery happened when paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, assisted by cavers Rick Hunter and Steve Tucker, explored the Rising Star Cave in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. I thought it's about time we revisited that earlier hominin species. Think of it as an update on wh...

Natural selection isn't perfect. It only cares that something works. If it works and is not harmful to its host, then that something is passed on.     For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

There is more than random mutations when it comes to evolution by natural selection. You also have to look at other variables outside of a genetic mutation. Variables such as the environment the organism lives in, the challenges it has to face, and its ability to find food.     For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Please join me for a brief update on the show, it's future, and what you can do to help.

Evolution by Natural Selection is a beautiful theory.  But as wonderful a theory as it is, it does have its detractors.  One argument states that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.  Is this true?   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Evolution by natural selection can build complex features through small, incremental changes. But can it build an eye?

Caves hide many things.  Be it shards of glass, arrowheads... or bones.  It's to whom these bones might have belonged to which often leads us on a path to great discoveries... and forgotten 'cousins'.

Consider this a 'lost episode' of Evolution Talk.  In it I talk with Stephanie Keep of BiteScis.org about the origins and misconceptions around the term 'survival of the fittest'.

In 1811 , or 1812, a young girl by the name of Mary Anning, along with her little brother, happened upon an incredible find while digging around the cliffs of Lyme Regis in England. It was a skull. A very large skull.

It's safe to say, and very few would disagree, that without Rosalind Franklin the double helix structure would not have been discovered when it was, nor perhaps by the same team of discoverers.

Way back in Episode 30 I stepped into a time machine and traveled back to 1869 in order to interview Charles Darwin. This time around I brought someone forward in time... his wife Emma Darwin.

Convergent evolution has shown us that nature will find similar solutions under similar conditions. So too might it be on other planets. Life might not look that much different that it does here

A cladogram will show those animals that share similar form and structures. It's not about animals which have evolved from one another. In this episode we are going to look at clades and cladistics. We will also create a cladogram... an audio cladogram.

Jonathan Tweet has authored a very remarkable book for children. He wasn't just trying to make evolution and its concepts easier to understand for kids in elementary school, Jonathan was shooting for an even younger audience. The result is the book 'Grandmother Fish'.

There are some who say that evolution by natural selection, at least when it applies to you and I, is no longer a driving force. The argument is that we are no longer evolving and that we've pushed natural selection aside and taken the reign of our own development.

Over the course of billions of years a small region of specialized cells began to develop sensory organs. These light sensitive cells slowly developed into eyes. Behind them another organ began to develop. It's still there, buried beneath everything else that has developed to become your brain today.

In 2013 a secret that had been hidden for hundreds of thousands of years in a South African cave was discovered. Bones... many bones. Upon inspection by a team of specialists a picture began to emerge. At the center of it all is a new species of hominin - Homo Naledi.

In this episode of Evolution Talk we take a look at some of the theories which have attempted to trace the evolution of music, from Charles Darwin to philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was fascinated with the origin and evolution of life. If there was a creator, finding the keys to his work had to involve careful study of the facts and an examination of the natural world with critical eyes.