New research suggests evolution might favor 'survival of the laziest'
If you've got an unemployed, 30-year-old adult child still living in the basement, fear not.
If you've got an unemployed, 30-year-old adult child still living in the basement, fear not.
Evolution
Aug 21, 2018
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23828
In the past 540 million years, the Earth has endured five mass extinction events, each involving processes that upended the normal cycling of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans. These globally fatal perturbations in ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 20, 2017
70
9265
Charles Darwin's landmark opus "On the Origin of the Species" ends with a beautiful summary of his theory of evolution: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into ...
Evolution
Dec 10, 2020
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14342
Humans are exterminating animal and plant species so quickly that nature's built-in defence mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, ...
Evolution
Oct 15, 2018
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14557
Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.
Earth Sciences
Jan 13, 2021
96
14587
Scientists have for the first time recovered RNA from an extinct species, the Tasmanian tiger, raising hope for the resurrection of animals once thought lost forever, Stockholm University researchers told AFP.
Paleontology & Fossils
Sep 26, 2023
1
932
The most severe mass extinction event in the past 540 million years eliminated more than 90 percent of Earth's marine species and 75 percent of terrestrial species. Although scientists had previously hypothesized that the ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 21, 2021
5
6372
Periodic mass extinctions on Earth, as indicated in the global fossil record, could be linked to a suspected ninth planet, according to research published by a faculty member of the University of Arkansas Department of Mathematical ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2016
115
3992
The Etruscan civilization, which flourished during the Iron Age in central Italy, has intrigued scholars for millennia. With remarkable metallurgical skills and a now-extinct, non-Indo-European language, the Etruscans stood ...
Archaeology
Sep 24, 2021
5
11197
A previously overlooked factor—the position of continents—helps fill Earth's oceans with life-supporting oxygen. Continental movement could ultimately have the opposite effect, killing most deep ocean creatures.
Earth Sciences
Aug 17, 2022
2
641
In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of a species or group of taxa. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of that species (although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point). Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "re-appears" (typically in the fossil record) after a period of apparent absence.
Through evolution, new species arise through the process of speciation—where new varieties of organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological niche—and species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition. A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance, although some species, called living fossils, survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Extinction, though, is usually a natural phenomenon; it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct.
Prior to the dispersion of humans across the earth, extinction generally occurred at a continuous low rate, mass extinctions being relatively rare events. Starting approximately 100,000 years ago, and coinciding with an increase in the numbers and range of humans, species extinctions have increased to a rate unprecedented since the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event. This is known as the Holocene extinction event and is at least the sixth such extinction event. Some experts have estimated that up to half of presently existing species may become extinct by 2100.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA