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A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroquinone for 50 bombardier beetles, I am now about to...more

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The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.

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We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.

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If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all th...more

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I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibl...more

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Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to impro...more

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The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sen...more

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[W]e can calculate our way into regions of miraculous improbability far greater than we can imagine as plausible. Let's look at this matter of what we...more

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The arms race between [predators] and [prey] is asymmetric, in which success on either side is felt as failure by the other side, but the nature of th...more

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The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the g...more

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What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what is actually possible. [O]ur eyes are built to cope ...more

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[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves — the bodies of living or...more

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Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity ch...more

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Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting t...more

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[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves — the bodies of living or...more