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Evolutionary Biology
From snowboarding crows to salmon-hat orcas, scientists are uncovering the deeper evolutionary purposes of play.
Banded mongooses highlight the deep link between cooperation and conflict in nature.
Tourism and environmental threats are shaping the fragile future of these iconic, surprisingly intelligent island predators.
Cognitive flexibility, opportunistic survival, and social cooperation have allowed rats to thrive in conditions that wipe out other species.
Once land plants, seagrasses staged one of evolution’s boldest reversals — returning to the ocean and reinventing their biology to thrive beneath the waves.
Science fiction romanticized Mars as a place of adventure and future settlement; science tells a very different story.
A big open question in 21st-century science is how life began here on Earth. The metabolism-first scenario just might be the best one.
The “dystopian” biotech imagined in these novels is now changing real lives for the better.
Speculative evolution explores the strange paths natural selection might have taken — and what that means for humans.
Some sci-fi aliens are wildly implausible. Others aren’t so far-fetched.
One big goal of science is to find an inhabited, Earth-like planet. But if we find an Earth-like world, will we even recognize it?
Just like animals, galaxies often have bizarre, unusual, or even unique properties. But finding many, all at once, really does raise alarms.
Well before plants and animals, there were fungi.
As we crank up our search for more powerful AI, maybe we should slow down and reimagine the shape and language of intelligence itself.
NASA’s Caleb Scharf talks with Big Think about life’s long experiment in expansion.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
Maybe — just don't expect a carbon copy.
In this excerpt from "Playful," Cas Holman surveys the research that brought the neuroscience of play into the mainstream.
Questions about our origins, biologically, chemically, and cosmically, are the most profound ones we can ask. Here are today's best answers.
The fear of unleashing forces beyond control has haunted science for centuries.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
Science helps us imagine the vastness of space and time — and our small but meaningful place within it.
Philosophers once prophesied that evolution would lead to minds far greater — and stranger — than our own.
"For many people, the idea that consciousness is a set of tricks is offensive," the late philosopher told Big Think in 2012. "I think that's a prime mistake."
Our Earthbound definitions of life could leave us blind to the Universe’s strangest forms.
At the center of Hubble's famous "cosmic horseshoe," a very heavy supermassive black hole has been robustly measured. How is it possible?
Somewhere, at some point in the history of our Universe, life arose. We're evidence of that here on Earth, but many big puzzles remain.
In "The Headache," Tom Zeller Jr. explores one of the human brain's most enduring, and painful, enigmas.
After more than a million years of separation, two branches of humanity reunited around 300,000 years ago, suggests new research.