Earth & Life Sciences

Let us now praise human population genetics

By Harry Ostrer

Exactly who are we anyway? Over the last generation, population genetics has emerged as a science that has made the discovery of human origins, relatedness, and diversity knowable in a way that is simple not possible from studying texts, genealogies, or archeological remains. Viewed as the successor to a race science that promoted the superiority of some human groups over others and that provided a basis for prejudice, forced sterilization, and even extermination, population genetics is framed as a discipline that is based on discovery using the amazing content of fully sequenced human genomes and novel computational methods.

Dynasties: painted wolves on the prowl

By Charis Edworthy

The endangered painted wolves are unusual in the animal kingdom for their cooperative social system. In the penultimate episode of BBC’s Dynasties, Sir David Attenborough is educating us about painted wolves and we’ve gathered some facts for you to enjoy as an accompaniment to the show.

Dynasties: lions with pride

By Charis Edworthy

Lions are arguably the most respected and feared creatures of the animal world. It is no surprise that their group structure has once more been examined in BBC’s Dynasties.

On animal sight and behaviour

By Michael Land

I have spent the last fifty years studying the eyes and vision of animals, including man.  During that time there have been many discoveries and ideas from vision research that have intrigued me, most of these are known to other scientists, but not more widely.

Dynasties: emperor of all penguins

By Charis Edworthy

Of the seventeen species of penguin in existence, the emperor penguin is arguably the most well-known and heavily documented. In the second post of our Dynasties blog series, we’ll be exploring how emperor penguins build their dynasties.

Dynasties: chimpanzees and their community

By Charis Edworthy

Sir David Attenborough returns to our screens tonight narrating a new nature documentary: Dynasties. We will be starting the series with one of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, who we diverged from roughly six million years ago: chimpanzees.

Life science documentaries

Did that moving episode of Blue Planet II pique your interest? Are you excited to discover the secrets of animal families in Dynasties? Delve deeper into key themes raised in these documentaries by exploring our existing blog series.

Learning from nature to save the planet

By Tony Prescott

Our planet is out of balance as the result of our technologies. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that global temperatures could reach a frightening plus +3° by the end of the century, our ocean ecosystems risk being overwhelmed by non-degrading plastic waste, open rubbish tips scar the landscape and pollute our water supplies […]

From the archive: revolutionary discoveries and celebrated voices [timeline]

By Charis Edworthy

From Darwin to Desmond Tutu, and numerous Nobel Prize winners in between, discover which well-known academics have published in our journals over the course of 140 years through our interactive timeline.

Animal of the Month: More to the bee than just honey

By Sydney Cameron

Great truths are often so pervasive or in such plain view as to be invisible. This is the case with bees and their food plants, the world’s quarter million flowering plant species, especially because it’s easy to overlook small things in a world in which whales and elephants hold the imagination of the public. Little […]

It Keeps Me Seeking

By Andrew Steane

Sometimes spouses will look back on the time of their getting to know one another and say, half-jokingly, that on a given occasion one was putting the other to the test.

From Darwin to DNA: evolution, genomics, and conservation of the Galapagos giant tortoises

By Evelyn Jensen, Joshua Miller, Michael Russello, and Adalgisa Caccone

Established in 1903, Journal of Heredity covers organismal genetics across a wide range of disciplines and taxa. Articles include such rapidly advancing fields as conservation genetics of endangered species, population structure and phylogeography, molecular evolution and speciation, molecular genetics of disease resistance in plants and animals, genetic biodiversity and relevant computer programs.

Ants are picky when using tools for foraging

By Gábor Lőrinczi

Tool use, once considered unique to our species, is now known to be widespread in the animal kingdom. It has been reported in most of the major taxonomic groups, with notable exceptions being myriapods, amphibians and reptiles. In insects, one of the best documented examples of tool use is seen in members of the ant […]

Animal of the month: the evolution of the imperfect honeybee

By Robin Crewe and Robin Moritz

Honey bee colonies have historically been considered as marvels of evolution resulting in perfectly cooperative and harmonious societies, and exemplars of what we humans might achieve. This is an appealing image to many, but it is of course a caricature. Nobody is perfect, not even honey bees.

Of gutters and ecosystems: the 50th anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act

By Ellen Wohl

“Rivers are the gutters down which flow the ruins of continents.” – Luna B. Leopold Luna Leopold understood that rivers are far more than gutters. In a 1964 textbook, he wrote figuratively of the role of river channels in transporting sediment to lower elevations. In other writings, however, Leopold’s understanding of rivers was closer to […]

Dystopia: an update

By Gregory Claeys

True aficionados of the earthly apocalypse cannot fail to have noted the deepening pessimism in discourses on what is often euphemistically referred to as “climate change”, but what should be designated “environmental catastrophe”. The Paris Agreement of 2015 conceded the need to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, albeit without binding nations to either achieve this specific target or impose specific binding targets in turn on the worst offenders, namely the fossil fuel industries.