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Evolution and Adaptation
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
How do species adapt to their environments?
Darwin argued that species became increasingly adapted to their environments as variants (or what we would now call genetic mutants) ...
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Evolution and Genetics
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Why was the discovery of genetics so important for our understanding of evolution?
Despite the fact that Darwin’s theory of evolution was widely acclaimed by his scientific ...
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Evolution and Natural Selection
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Why do we need a theory of evolution?
We live in a world of immense diversity. There are around 5,500 species of mammals and some 10,000 species of birds. But even that pales into ...
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Evolution of Behavior
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
What role does behavior play in evolution?
Most adaptations ultimately require some level of genetic change, but genetic change depends in part on the availability of sufficient ...
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Evolution of Complexity
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Why do some species eat others?
Life began as microscopic single-celled organisms making their own energy from sunlight and other chemical resources. At some point, some of these ...
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Evolution of Culture
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Does culture evolve?
Culture is defined as those aspects of our behavior and beliefs that are learned—passed on from parents to children or between two unrelated individuals, by ...
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Evolution of Humans
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Who were our earliest ancestors?
Our lineage can be said to have started when the African great apes of the late Miocene gave rise to a new, more terrestrial group, the ...
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Evolution of Life
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Can we say how life on earth started?
The origins of life on earth must predate the earliest fossils, and presumably must be simpler in form than even those earliest fossils. It is ...
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Evolution of Sociality
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Why do some animals live in groups?
The ancestral mammals were small (we can tell that from their fossils) and almost certainly solitary (as suggested by reconstructing their ...
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Evolution of Species
Robin Dunbar
in Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know®
What is a species?
Having some way of classifying the natural world is important. That is the starting point of all science. For biology, it is also important for undertaking the ...
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From Not Alive to Almost Alive
David W. Deamer
in Origin of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know®
If you are reading this book hoping to learn how life began, I’m sorry to say that no one knows the answer yet. We do know something about what the Earth was like four billion years ago ...
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How to Assemble a Habitable Planet
David W. Deamer
in Origin of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless gas that, when given enough time, changes into people. How much time? 13.7 billion years!
A good way to present the ...
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Introduction
David W. Deamer
in Origin of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know®
I’ll begin with a challenging question: Why should anyone want to know about the origin of life? The answers will vary from one person to the next, but the simplest answer is curiosity. ...
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What We Still Need to Discover
David W. Deamer
in Origin of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know®
The title of this book is The Origins of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know. Well, everyone needs to know not just the answers we have found so far but also the questions that remain. This ...
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