Evolution Talk

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 understand exactly how much energy is involved when we use our jaws.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

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 the ocean waves might hold the answer. For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com

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 limited resources at your disposal would you decide to throw all your effort into producing as many offspring as possible, as quickly as possible?  Or would you take a different tactic and produce a one or two offspring, protecting and nourishing them until they can take care of themselves? Both strategies might work.  And that’s what nature had to do.  It had two strategies to chose from.  They are known as the r and K selection estrategies.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com

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.  Those will tell us a few things, but not everything.  We need a multi-disciplinary approach.  One that combines astronomy, biology, oceanography and chemistry - and that’s just to name a few. Enter Astrobiology.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

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 Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

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, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

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 they slaughtered and fought with spears.   Spoiler alert - we really don’t refer to them as Cro-Magnon anymore. For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

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, researchers 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.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

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 what science has to say about them now.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

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.