Browse Items (1108 total)

Sun light across an open field, central Iowa.

Empty Space 62-02-FrazD-A-01.jpg Story Summary - In the wide-open spaces that make up rural communities across Iowa there is little. Nearly half of the state's 99 counties lost population during the 90's. These quiet, lonely places are artifacts of a…

Convergent Evolution. Specialized anoles, lizards native to Jamaica, are not closely related to other species on other islands. The lesson, although variations occur randomly, similar ecological circumstances sometimes yield uncannily similar…

How Evolution Touches You. Peter Kibisov, a former convict in Russia, carries two enduring remnants from his prison time, a crucifixion tatoo and drug-resistant tuberculosis. He hopes God will help him, but evolution-based science is what guides the…

Island Biogeography. Darwin collected these finches, hardly notable except for the various sizes and shapes of their beaks. The reason for such patterns of diversification was that isolation -- plus time, plus adaptation to local conditions -- leads…

Natural Selection. The overabundance of offspring, such as salmon sac fry, creates competion, in which better adapted individuals succeed. Failure means death without offspring or, extinction without descendant species.

Anatomical Clues. Two primitive worker ants, preserved in amber from the Cretaceous period, offer another sort of evidence, anatomical clues, such as wasplike antennae and a broad waist, revealing their transitional status between ancestral wasps and…

One flower that captivated Darwin was the Madagascar Orchid, with it's eleven inch-long receptacle. He predicted that somewhere in Magagascar, a place he never visited, must live a moth with a proboscis eleven inches long, adapted to harvest the…

One flower that captivated Darwin was the Madagascar Orchid, with it's eleven inch-long receptacle. He predicted that somewhere in Magagascar, a place he never visited, must live a moth with a proboscis eleven inches long, adapted to harvest the…

The giraffe intrigued Darwin less for the length of it's neck than for the shape of it's tail, which looked to him like a 'fly-flapper.' Fly-swabbing, he noted, could help an animal survive.