Evolution Down Under
How did Australia come to be marsupial heaven?
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Evolution Down Under
Australia, the smallest of the seven continents, is the world capital of two of the three types of mammal on Earth: the marsupials, like the kangaroo and koala, which nourish their young in pouches, and the monotremes, featuring the platypus and the echidnas, which nourish their young in eggs. (The third variety, placentals, include all the rest of us—from mice to whales to people—which nourish their young in an advanced placenta.)
- 05/01/2007
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Board vs. Teachers
In 2004 the quiet town of Dover, Pennsylvania was catapulted into the spotlight of national attention and scrutiny. That year, Dover Area School District board member Bill Buckingham requested that a textbook teaching intelligent design—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent—be added to the science program.
Board vs. Teachers
Read the Dover School Board's controversial disclaimer on evolution and the memo science teachers wrote in response.
- 10/01/2007
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Gigantism & Dwarfism on Islands
Island giants are aplenty: Komodo has its dragons. Madagascar has its giant hissing cockroach. Until about 1,000 years ago, New Zealand had its colossal bird, the moa. Of dwarves, the world has witnessed everything from foxes, rabbits, and snakes that are smaller than their mainland counterparts, to that ultimate oxymoron, the pygmy mammoth, which once existed in various forms from California's Channel Islands to Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic.
Gigantism & Dwarfism on Islands
Why do many animal species become either larger or smaller on islands over time?
- 11/01/2008
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Creature Courtship
For most people, the glorious train of the peacock is a joy to behold. But for Darwin in the years immediately following the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species, in which he laid out his theory of evolution by natural selection, the peacock's resplendent train amounted to an eyesore.
Creature Courtship
Why do males expend such time and energy to find a mate? Because of a little force of nature known as sexual selection.
- 12/01/2001
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Timing is Everything
Every living being carries within it evidence of more than 3.5 billion years of evolutionary change and adaptation by its ancestors. And it just so happens that much of the evidence we humans carry is most obvious—to the eye, at least—during the stages of life that take place inside the womb. So if you watch developing embryos through the lens of evolutionary biology, they can carry you on even more amazing journeys—outward to the odyssey of life's history, and inward, into the invisible world of genes.
Timing is Everything
Developing embryos reveal secrets about both genetics and the odyssey of life on Earth.
- 01/01/1996
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Killer Instinct
By almost any standard, lemurs are adorable, like a child's stuffed animal come alive. "Yellow Silver," a wild male lemur I once had the pleasure of observing close up in a Madagascar rain forest, epitomized this cuteness. Reclining on a hammock-like vine just six feet away, he was so close I could smell his bushy black fur and see his human-like fingernails and eyelashes. Totally ignoring me, he draped one hand lazily over a twig and now and then curled up his two-foot tail chameleon-style then let it unfurl. Yellow Silver was dozing off a hot afternoon—a picture of idle contentment.
Killer Instinct
Rats do it to survive, but why is infanticide so widespread among primates, and what does that say about us?
- 02/01/2009
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A Potpourri of Pooches
One way to get a feel for just how diverse dogs have become is to jam your fingers down the throat of a Great Dane and then, minutes later, a Chihuahua. This is what I found myself doing at age 16 during my first full-time summer job. A large kennel near my home boarded about 100 dogs, and soon after I started working there I discovered that not only was mine to be the hand that fed and cleaned up after them, but was also to be the one to administer pills to those on medication.
A Potpourri of Pooches
How come dogs, alone among Earth's species, come in so many shapes and sizes?
- 01/01/2004
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- Producer's Story
NOVA and Intelligent Design
In the following interview, NOVA's Senior Executive Producer Paula Apsell addresses how and why NOVA told the story of Kitzmiller v. Dover, a landmark court case that examined whether intelligent design qualifies as a science.
NOVA and Intelligent Design
Paula Apsell explains why and how NOVA took on the contentious issues behind a landmark court case.
- 10/01/2007
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In Defense of Evolution
Dr. Kenneth Miller is as familiar as anyone in the scientific community with the intelligent-design movement and its attempts to undermine the theory of evolution. A professor of biology at Brown University and coauthor (with Joe Levine) of the standard high-school textbook Biology, Miller testified at the Dover trial as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, the Dover parents who brought suit against their town's school board. Here, Miller, who stresses that he is also a man of faith, talks about why evolution matters, what flaws he sees in the intelligent-design argument, and why the Dover decision hardly means the end of the controversy.
In Defense of Evolution
Biologist Ken Miller on why ID is a "science stopper," why evolution matters, and more
- 10/01/2007
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Defending Intelligent Design
Phillip Johnson is known as the father of intelligent design. The idea in its current form appeared in the 1980s, and Johnson adopted and developed it after Darwinian evolution came up short, in his view, in explaining how all organisms, including humans, came into being. Johnson taught law for over 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of the book Darwin on Trial, in which he argues that empirical evidence in support of Darwin's theory is lacking. In this interview, hear why he feels that such evidence is "somewhere between weak and nonexistent," why he feels intelligent design is a testable science, and why he thought the Dover trial was a train wreck waiting to happen.
Defending Intelligent Design
Phillip Johnson, the father of ID, on the Wedge Strategy, why evolution "comes up short," and more
- 10/01/2007
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A Conversation With E.O. Wilson
In 1984, Edward Wilson published a slim volume called Biophilia. In it he proposed the eponymous term, which literally means "love of life," to label what he defined as humans' innate tendency to focus on living things, as opposed to the inanimate. While Wilson acknowledged that hard evidence for the proposition is not yet strong, the scientific study of biophilia being in its infancy, he stressed that "the biophilic tendency is nevertheless so clearly evinced in daily life and widely distributed as to deserve serious attention." He also hoped that an understanding and acceptance of our inherent love of nature, if it exists, might generate a new conservation ethic. On the eve of the book's 25th anniversary, NOVA's Peter Tyson spoke with the "father of biophilia" in his office at Harvard about where the concept stands today and what could happen—to both the natural and human worlds—if we fail to cultivate it.
A Conversation With E.O. Wilson
Do humans have "biophilia," a built-in love for living things?
- 04/01/2008
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How Did Life Begin?
What are the origins of life? How did things go from non-living to living? From something that could not reproduce to something that could? One person who has exhaustively investigated this subject is paleontologist Andrew Knoll, a professor of biology at Harvard and author of Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Life. In this wide-ranging interview, Knoll explains, among other compelling ideas, why higher organisms like us are icing on the cake of life, how deeply living things and our planet are intertwined, and why it's so devilishly difficult to figure out how life got started.
How Did Life Begin?
Harvard's Andrew Knoll discusses the deeply mysterious jump long ago from non-living to living.
- 07/01/2004
