Evolution | featured news

According to a new Gallup poll, the number of Americans who believe humans evolved without the involvement of a higher power has risen.

Two wings or four: why flying fish evolved different ways to take to the air.

Research by University of Leeds plant scientists has uncovered a snapshot of evolution in progress, by tracing how a gene mutation over 100 million years ago led flowers to make male and female parts in different ways.

Tibetans may have undergone one of the fastest bouts of human evolution on record: Those having genes that allow them to thrive at high altitudes ...

Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.

A fossil skeleton of a child discovered in a cave system known as the Cradle of Humankind may represent a previously unknown stage in the evolution of man, The (London) Sunday Times reported. The skeleton, which is almost complete despite being two million years old, is believed to belong to one of the hominid groups that includes humans.

The climate could have a direct effect on the speed of "molecular evolution" in mammals, according to a study.

On a submersible dive off the Bahamas, Mikhail V. Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and several colleagues were seeking big-eyed, glowing animals adapted to darkness.

Dueling theories of how the universe was created got a split decision Friday night from the Texas Board of Education, which required examination of "all sides of scientific evidence" in new science standards, but rejected language requiring teachers to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories.