Evolution Talk

In 1893, the German zoologist Wilhelm Haacke published  Design and Inheritance. In it, Haacke introduced the concept of orthogenesis.  According to Haacke, changes in organisms are directed toward perfection.   Evolution Talk is also a book! You can find links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others on the front page of EvolutionTalk.com, or call your local bookstore and ask them to order a copy. For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Consider this episode a memorial to the millions of extinct animals that once walked the earth long before we inherited it.  Like fragments of novels and poems that have been found over the years, hinting at what might have been, we have fossils and shards of bones to tell us what once was. Evolution Talk is also a book! You can find links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others on the front page of EvolutionTalk.com, or call your local bookstore and ask them to order a copy. For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Great idea don't spring out of a vacuum, but they do sometimes seem to.  In this episode we take a look at a few.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Evolution Talk - the book is now available at your local bookstore! If you love the show, and have listened to the last 100 episodes this book is for you.  If you’re a student, or want to learn more about evolution by natural selection it’s the perfect introduction.  If you’re a teacher, your class will love it. Just like the show, it’s meant to be accessible and easy to grasp. You can find links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others on the front page of EvolutionTalk.com, or call your local bookstore and ask them to order a copy.

What came first, the chicken or the egg?  It's an age old question.  How about another one?  What stored genetic information first?  DNA or RNA?   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Colossal Biosciences hopes to reintroduce the wooly mammoth to the world, thousands of years after the last one walked the earth.  If successful they will have paved the way for a "de-extinction pipeline" for other lost species.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste  

Evolution by Natural Selection has assisted many amazing symbiotic relationships.  Here's one you may not be familiar with, and which you're a participant in.  It involves your gut microbiome.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste Evolution Talk's TeePublic Store

In 1976, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene.  It made exactly the splash he’d intended, but people were confused. How can genes be selfish?   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Stephen Jay Gould once asked what would happen if the evolution of life on Earth were to take the same path if we had the ability to start it all over again?  In this episode we'll ask the question again ...   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Imagine a world without mutants. I don’t mean those super-powered heroes that populate the comics and movies from Marvel. I’m talking about you, me, and everyone else we know.  We are all mutants trying to survive.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Just what does the act of chewing have to do with brain size and evolution?  Perhaps nothing or everything.  A team of researchers is helping us to understand exactly how much energy is involved when we use our jaws.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

It has long been believed that an early oxygenation even gave rise to the eukaryotes.  Perhaps oxygen had nothing to do with it. A castle deep beneath the ocean waves might hold the answer. For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com

If you were somehow in control of repopulating and regenerating an area that had essentially been wiped clean of life, how would you do it?  With limited resources at your disposal would you decide to throw all your effort into producing as many offspring as possible, as quickly as possible?  Or would you take a different tactic and produce a one or two offspring, protecting and nourishing them until they can take care of themselves? Both strategies might work.  And that’s what nature had to do.  It had two strategies to chose from.  They are known as the r and K selection estrategies.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com

How do we find life in a galaxy, or galaxies, far far away while sitting here on Earth? It’s not just by looking through telescopes or sending probes.  Those will tell us a few things, but not everything.  We need a multi-disciplinary approach.  One that combines astronomy, biology, oceanography and chemistry - and that’s just to name a few. Enter Astrobiology.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

A friend of mine recently posed a question on his podcast about carrion plants.  If you don't know what one is, the carrion plant emits an odor that is very similar to rotting flesh.This odor attracts flies which serve to pollinate the flower.  The question posed on my friend’s show was how?  How does the plant know to do this?   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

We don’t know why dogs became man’s best friend, but we have some ideas.  And those ideas take us back anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.They are perhaps the perfect visual example when it comes to witnessing the power of the gene pool and how a selection process, whether natural or artificial, can affect it.  For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

In this episode I want to introduce you to someone.  Actually, this someone is a thing, and this thing wiggled its way through life between two to four billion years ago. Listener, meet LUCA. Your Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA, meet your descendant.   For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

As a kid I was fascinated by the idea of cavemen.  Of course, all I had to go on were a few poorly produced movies that depicted cavemen battling dinosaurs, which of course never happened.  I even owned an early plastic model of a Cro-Magnon man and woman.  To me the Cro-Magnon were indistinguishable from the Neanderthals.  As far as I knew they both lived in caves, wore skins of the animals they slaughtered and fought with spears.   Spoiler alert - we really don’t refer to them as Cro-Magnon anymore. For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

Many years ago, in 1977, astronomer and author Carl Sagan offered us the concept of a “Cosmic Calendar” in his book The Dragons of Eden.  It’s a fun thought experiment in which you take the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang until now, and represent it as calendar year.  For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste

It's time to look at fossil dating again!  The last episode mentioned two dating methods used to estimate how old the Homo Naledi bones found the Rising Star cave system might be. To do so, researchers used a Uranium-thorium method as well as electron spin resonance, or “ESR”.  Let's take a brief look at what each of these entail.  For show notes and more, please visit https://EvolutionTalk.com Written, Produced, & Narrated by: Rick Coste