Episode 99
The Eggplant of Life
What came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s an age old question. How about another one? What stored genetic information first? DNA or RNA? Evol...
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Explore 159 episodes covering the who, what, why, and how of evolution
Episode 98
Bringing Back the Mammoth
Colossal Biosciences hopes to reintroduce the wooly mammoth to the world, thousands of years after the last one walked the earth. If successful they ...
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A Gut Feeling
Evolution by Natural Selection has assisted many amazing symbiotic relationships. Here’s one you may not be familiar with, and which you’re a partici...
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The Immortal Gene
In 1976, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene. It made exactly the splash he’d intended, but people were confuse...
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Hitting Replay
Stephen Jay Gould once asked what would happen if the evolution of life on Earth were to take the same path if we had the ability to start it all over...
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The Joy of Mutation
Imagine a world without mutants. I don’t mean those super-powered heroes that populate the comics and movies from Marvel. I’m talking about you, me, a...
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Jaws
Just what does the act of chewing have to do with brain size and evolution? Perhaps nothing or everything. A team of researchers is helping us to un...
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Love is Like... Hydrogen?
It has long been believed that an early oxygenation even gave rise to the eukaryotes. Perhaps oxygen had nothing to do with it. A castle deep beneath...
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A Selection Strategy
If you were somehow in control of repopulating and regenerating an area that had essentially been wiped clean of life, how would you do it? With limi...
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A Bit of Astrobiology
How do we find life in a galaxy, or galaxies, far far away while sitting here on Earth? It’s not just by looking through telescopes or sending probes....
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Carrion My Wayward Plant
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 i...
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Artificial Selection
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 a...
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Meet LUCA
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...
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Cro-Magnon
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 dinos...
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The Cosmic Calendar
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 t...
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Dating Fossils Again
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 Risi...
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Homo Naledi 2020
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 pa...
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Evolution Does Not Produce Perfection
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. Ev...
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Is Evolution Random?
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 mut...
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The Second Law of Thermodynamics
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 evol...
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