Richard Dawkins’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins and http://www.richarddawkins.net/) 2004 popular science book, The Ancestor’s Tale, is loosely modelled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Instead of pilgrims journeying to Canterbury, Dawkins’ protagonists are living species, journeying back through evolutionary time. In real time, individual species diverged and speciated. But in the backwards time of The Ancestor’s Tale, separate species start the […]

Tens of thousands of years ago, the arrival of people in the Americas, and in Australia and New Zealand, was followed by a wave of extinctions, particularly of the largest species, which made the most attractive game. More recently, rats, cats and goats have eaten their way through the native plants and animals of small

Evolution does not proceed in mighty anatomical jumps but through a process of gradual change, by transforming – very slightly – a gene, cell or bone so that it acts to a new purpose. In this way, a new species is eventually created, albeit one that still carries the hallmarks of its evolutionary predecessors.  This inner

  Brian Greene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Greene and http://www.briangreene.org/) has a gift for elucidating big ideas and knowing that a bombardment of too many small ones might make the armchair physicist despair.   ‘The art of theoretical physics lies in simplifying the complex so as to preserve essential physical features while making the theoretical analysis tractable,’ he writes in his latest