The Cambrian explosion - Between 520 and 550 million years ago, a sudden explosion of animal types appear in the fossil record. This example of rapid evolution is known as the Cambrian explosion. Theories of how and why it occurred range from the noti...

We’re upside-down? - In today’s rather short episode, we talk about the first creatures to have developed a centralized nervous system, though not a central nervous system as of yet. It was a simple worm like creature,

Electricity life and Frankensteinean experiments - A stun gun works by passing electricity through your muscles, causing uncontrollable contractions. An electric eel, which is actually a type of fish, can do the same thing.

side-stepping inheritance - Darwin originally published “On the Origins of Species” in 1859. At the time, the mechanism of inheritance wasn’t well understood. Inheritance and the implication that lifeforms could change over time stood in contrast to t...

Why go multicellular? - Bacteria are very successful. They’ve been around for billions of years, as compared to hundreds of millions for multicellular creatures. They have survived mass extinctions that wiped out things like the dinosaurs and others.

The one become many, and the many are one - How did life move from simple single celled forms, into more complex multicellular ones? In today’s episode, we talk about an experiment that induced that transition in the laboratory. -

How to make a mind—part3 - Take life, put it in the right environment, and give it between 3.5 and 4 billion years. We take the time to review what we’ve covered since “How to make a mind—part1,” episode 35; and “How to make a mind—part2,

Death - There are creatures that do not seem to have a natural limit on their life span. They only die when they are killed by accident or the action of sickness parasites and pathogens. Other creatures are apparently programmed to die at a given time...

Sex - This episode turned out to be both long and hard. Feel free to snicker at this point. It was long because I couldn’t resist the numerical pun. To match this episode’s number with its subject, I had to squish together the development of eukaryote...

An environmental catastrophe - Sometimes, a new species will come into being, and explode across the planet. The population increases drastically within a short time period as they learn to use new materials and new forms of energy. Sometimes,