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 The genealogies of European royalty are genuinely terrifying in their complexity. No matter which history book you open, someone is always marrying some cousin of the third degree. To give you an idea: there are at least 4,010 different lines of descent from William the Conqueror to Prince William. Go figure. Protein families might rival [...]  The figure below comes from Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare, a book written by the medieval armour expert Bashford Dean (1867 – 1930). The similarities between the evolution of these European war helmets and ‘proper’ biological evolution are striking. At the base we can see the ancestor of this clade of helmets: the [...]  Every high school student now learns that plate tectonics slowly drive our continents in different directions. Since only the most uncontroversial scientific knowledge finds its way to high school text books, it’s hard to imagine that when the theory of continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, it was firmly rejected by the [...]  In the early September days of 1941, the German Luftwaffe started a prolonged bombardment of London which would later become known as ‘the Blitz‘. As the bombs continued to drop for months, thousands of Londoners sought refuge in the underground railway system. During the most intense periods of bombardment, the London Underground was home to [...]  When it comes to ancient times, biologists are pretty sloppy timekeepers. They measure time with something that they call the ‘molecular clock‘. Since every gene will undergo small mutations over time, they simply look at the number of differences between two genes of two different species to estimate how long ago they shared a common [...]  The saying “To know your future, you must know your past” is of special value to biologists. There’s no better way to understand an organism, than by it’s ancestry. It’s the only way creatures make any sense really! From appendices to tail bones, a species evolutionary past can sheds light on otherwise unexplainable features. But [...] |
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