The Beginning: An Arms Race

As predators evolved to better catch their prey, their prey evolved unique and efficient ways to avoid being eaten. It was because of this sudden arms race that we see the proliferation of body forms that mark the Cambrian Era. The real winners were the Trilobites....

The Beginning: Multicellularity Rules

The reason natural selection had such a grand old-time with multicellular organisms is because it gave it something to select for. These organisms increased in size, moved into new areas for food, and protected themselves against the environment. It is during this...

The Beginning: Sexual Reproduction

One day, millions of years ago, something occurred between two unsuspecting eukaryotes. When they bumped into one another something magical happened. They both left that encounter slightly different than they had been before. What passed from one to the other was a...

The Beginning: Cyanobacteria

3.5 billion years ago microbial organisms appeared on the earth. These organisms combined, split, and combined some more, until the formation of microbes and single-celled algae. One of these single-celled algae-like organisms were cyanobacteria. Evolution Talk is...

The Beginning: Life

In the beginning the Earth wasn’t exactly a hospitable place. It was hot, volcanic, and oxygen was a rare commodity. So the question now is how did life emerge from these conditions? We are still asking this 4.6 billion years later. Darwin proposed a primordial pond...