Evolution, Morphology and Exobiology

If a modern human baby was given a diet of hard foods, such as canes, twigs, hard fruit and root vegetables, would the thickness of their enamel increase?

In studies of ancient skeletons prior to say 500,000 years ago I often come across people talking about brain size as if it were clear indication of human development. Brain sizes in the human race vary enormously according to age and other criteria. My wife is very petite and has a smaller brain than I am of average height and have a very large hat size. Now I realise that we are talking about brain size relative to body size, and sometimes we have other bones to calculate body size, and I know that scientists can guesstimate the age of a skull from the plates of the skull and their fusion. However, surely in order to make statements about human development from pe…

Does anyone know about academic work on the role of retroviruses in evolution. I am thinking that these viruses could insert preformed code into alien species and thereby alter their path of evolution. I cant seem to find much material about this in the literature

I want my future offspring to be noticeably stronger and faster and physically superior to other humans. I know that mutations are mostly random and that can be sometimes passed down through generations I know there is selective breeding where you can breed with people who have your desired traits and you can breed with them for a probably outcome of offspring I know evolution occur in population not a single person I am wondering if I tick all these boxes, how long it will take to evolve into stronger faster and physically superior human beings?

I am looking for a site or/and a magazine that would keep me up to date with human evolution. Topics included would be ancient history, anthropology, human behaviour, evolution and biology. I am seeking to avoid all the stupid conspiracy theory stuff - e.g. "proof of ancient technology and space contact" etc... The magazines I have found tend to only cover the topic occasionally Any worthy sites or magazines?

Which species did Gorillas evolve from and also do they share a common ancestor with humans? Why do you think Gorillas evolved to be muscular, big and strong and physically the way they are?

please delete this one, I open two by mistake, thank you.

And that is something unique to humans. Is it also true that we use to out run our prey in the wild by tiring them out in long distant chases.

Are we born to be lean mean fighting machines in the wild? To be hunter gatherers? To be the best as possible at sex? What are our human bodies evolutionarily designed for up until this point in time?

Richard Dawkins explains "the purpose of life is spreading copy me programs." Oops! Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Schermer, Daniel Dennett, and Bill Nye The Science Guy together have fewer children than Osama Bin Laden.

I've wondered, and I'm sure others have too, if we have - for the most part - reached the point where we are no longer evolving due to natural selection. Specifically, given modern medicine and social support, how much of a factor is "natural selection" any more, since most people can live past the point of reproduction regardless of their genetic make-up? Certainly some factors remain. For example, tall people are more attractive, so they will have more children, and so forth. I know natural selection still exists for humanity, if perhaps reduced compared to other time periods in our history. But what I am really getting at, is have we reached a point where UN-n…

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-century-old-life-significant-substantiation.html A century-old model for life's origin gets significant substantiation July 25, 2018, Weizmann Institute of Science A 'walk' in composition space for a lipid world molecular assembly, shown in simplified 3 dimensions. A point on the line signifies a specific composition along the time axis, whereby the three coordinates are amounts of the three different molecule types. A composome (pink background) is a time interval when the composition stays almost unchanged, signifying compositional replication. Credit: Weizmann Institute of Science In 1924, Russian biochemist Alexander O…

Among all the mammals humans have the longest hair and beard. The apes are claimed to be closest to humans physiologically. But they have scarce hair on their faces. A bonobos A Chimpanzee A male gorilla A gibbon A An orangutan male At least non of them have such thing as a fully-developed mustache. Someone can argue that non of the apes live in a cold climate in difference from humans. But here are some representatives of a nations who always lived in a hot climate. g

I grew up (pre-DNA knowledge), when scientists claimed that the domestic dog was a direct descendant of the grey wolf. However, at the same time, they were sure that the Giant Panda was as was also the Red Panda, more closely related to Raccoons that Bears. However, as I understand it, DNA has how shown that Giant and Red Pandas are not related but that Red Pandas are related to Raccoons (as thought even previous to DNA) but the Giant Pandas are related to Bears. Which brings me to dogs. Given that the African Hunting Dog, AKA, Painted Dog resembles the domestic dog way more than it seems the Grey Wolf does, has there been any DNA studies confirming that the Dom…

My first posting in this forum, so.... The consensus is that humans (sapiens) slowly made their way out of Africa around 100K years ago (or so) and eventually populated the Earth. Considering that mammals survived the KT extinction around 66 MYA and were present worldwide, why wouldn't they evolve likewise throughout the planet, as they did in Africa apparently. Or perhaps they did (though I haven't read about it) considering the many different "races" in the world today. Why would Africa be the only sweet spot? Or could it be that there WERE other Homo "evolutions" worldwide, but natural selection edited the others out somehow and left Africa as the only birthpl…

humans have evolved to be soft-skinned have no way to defend themselves (claws horns, etc.) and we cant climb trees like monkeys we don't blend into our environment the only good thing is that we are smart and barely even that anymore considering whats going on in the world so why did we evolve like this and only us

Hello! I could use some expert help in defending the methodology and nature of natural science as a broad discipline from some odd arguments made by an acquaintance at college. I hope you folks can help me: I’m a biology undergrad debating with a philosophy undergrad, and he’s making it a bit hard for me to defend the very basis of my field, a fact of which I admit I’m ashamed. I’m posting this here also (perhaps innaproproately, and if so of course I understand if the mods end this thread) for two reasons: I’m studying to be an evolutionary biologist, and my interlocutor is an ID advocate :). He says: “the God of the Gaps argument does not asses that God cannot be inf…

Hi, I’m Marshall. I report here an event of academic cheating because I find their data is fraudulent or their figures are fake. These figures has been published on Molecular ecology with title “Warm–cold colonization: response of oaks to uplift of the Himalaya–Hengduan Mountains” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/mec.14092). Then, I show, how to find this academic cheating event. Following the Section Data accessibility, I download the sequences from ncbi GenBank. Then I align these sequences using MEGA and I account the number of variant sites. A total of 23 polymorphic sites are found. Then, I plan to do ph…

Is it possible to trace Birds flying farthest from place to place Viz city to city in a country, state to state in a country, country to country ? Thanks & Regards, Prashant S Akerkar

Morphology -------------------- What are the Biological or Morphological reasons that we observe that people look similar by face. Maybe very identical looking through they are not real brothers, cousins, distant relatives. Examples : We say this man looks very similar to my uncle. This woman resembles my maternal uncle. Thanks & Regards, Prashant S Akerkar

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-scientists-exoplanets-life-earth.html the paper: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaar3302 The origin of RNA precursors on exoplanets Abstract Given that the macromolecular building blocks of life were likely produced photochemically in the presence of ultraviolet (UV) light, we identify some general constraints on which stars produce sufficient UV for this photochemistry. We estimate how much light is needed for the UV photochemistry by experimentally measuring the rate constant for the UV chemistry (“light chemistry”, needed for prebiotic synthesis) versus the rate constants for the bimolecular reactions th…

How did dinosaurs get so big? especially the sauropods... Can it be related to a high % CO2 in the atmosphere? -CO2 causes plants to grow bigger...this implies more food for dinosaurs which enables size-growth.

In another thread (not worth reading) there was a link to this paper: https://phe.rockefeller.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Stoeckle-Thaler-Final-reduced.pdf One of the interesting (fascinating, even) results of their study is that species are well defined by the mitochondrial DNA "barcode"; in other words the individuals within a species have one barcode, those in another have a different one and there is nothing in between. As one of the authors put it: "if individuals are stars, then species are galaxies". Although I can't see it in the paper (I have only skimmed it and much of it is over my head - without giving it more time than I have available!) it …

For nearly forty years I have been working on a personal project to somehow reconcile two seemingly incompatible ideas. On the one hand there is now overwhelming evidence that we (and other species) carry within us biological "circuitry" that if triggered, induces low mood which brings in its train physiological effects that, particularly in the natural world, would lead to a rapid exit from the gene pool. On the other, there is the impelling logic implicit within selfish gene theory that natural selection will winnow out any behaviors which do not serve to ensure the repeated replication of the genes defining them. Put another way, major depressive episodes are known, fo…

Somehow, never considered morphology on a snail being right or left, irrelevant, not to pay attention. Thought there were both kinds of it, randomly. A publication says the lefty species is a rarity. "The lefty is the right one" :