Hacker News with Generative AI: Evolution

Why did a frozen Earth coincide with an evolutionary spurt? (colorado.edu)
CU Boulder geologists Lizzy Trower and Carl Simpson win $1 million in support from W.M. Keck Foundation to try to solve an evolutionary puzzle and to extend Earth’s temperature record by 2 billion years

Earth Science, Evolution, Geology, Research Funding

4 points by isaacfrond 5 days ago | 3 comments

The Great Filter Comes for Us All (codinghorror.com)
With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven't any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now?

Space Exploration, Evolution

12 points by mooreds 11 days ago | 5 comments

Stone selection by wild chimpanzees shares patterns with Oldowan hominins (sciencedirect.com)
The use of broad tool repertoires to increase dietary flexibility through extractive foraging behaviors is shared by humans and their closest living relatives (chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes).

Chimpanzees, Archaeology, Tool Use, Animal Behavior, Evolution

36 points by benbreen 11 days ago | 4 comments

Software creators are the new content creators (workingtheorys.com)
No, this isn’t the end of software, but it is the beginning of a new software era. And I like the media industry analogy, but it’s an evolution, not a death.

Software Development, Content Creation, Media Industry, Evolution

10 points by antelopetracks 12 days ago | 3 comments

70 Years of Height Evolution in the NBA (runrepeat.com)
“You can’t teach height” - Red Auerbach

Sports, Basketball, NBA, History, Evolution

13 points by belter 14 days ago | 0 comments

Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life (quantamagazine.org)
Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab.

Science, Biology, Evolution, Microbiology

25 points by isaacfrond 15 days ago | 1 comments

Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life (quantamagazine.org)
Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab.

Biology, Evolution, Science, Microbes

12 points by billybuckwheat 15 days ago | 0 comments

How Did the "Smile" Become a Friendly Gesture in Humans? (scientificamerican.com)

Human Behavior, Evolution, Communication, Psychology

6 points by thunderbong 24 days ago | 1 comments

Cultural Evolution of Cooperation Among LLM Agents (arxiv.org)
Large language models (LLMs) provide a compelling foundation for building generally-capable AI agents.

Artificial Intelligence, Cooperation, Evolution

246 points by Anon84 31 days ago | 131 comments

Why do animals adopt? (nautil.us)
Taking responsibility for another’s young reveals the deep evolutionary roots of care.

Animal Behavior, Evolution, Parenting

47 points by dnetesn 39 days ago | 53 comments

What fossilized dino feces can tell us about their rise to dominance (arstechnica.com)
Paleontologists have long puzzled over how the dinosaurs—originally relatively small and of minor importance to the broader ecosystem—evolved to become the dominant species some 30 million years later. Fossilized feces and vomit from dinosaurs might hold important clues to how and why this evolutionary milestone came about, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

Paleontology, Dinosaurs, Evolution, Science

21 points by Brajeshwar 51 days ago | 3 comments

All Life on Earth Today Descended from a Single Cell. Meet LUCA (quantamagazine.org)
The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish.

Evolution, Biology, Science

58 points by EA-3167 58 days ago | 15 comments

How human brains got so big: cells learned to handle stress that comes with size (nature.com)
Humans have evolved disproportionately large brains compared with our primate relatives — but this neurological upgrade came at a cost. Scientists exploring the trade-off have discovered unique genetic features that show how human brain cells handle the stress of keeping a big brain working. The work could inspire new lines of research to understand conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia.

Evolution, Neuroscience, Genetics, Brain Health

7 points by bookofjoe 59 days ago | 0 comments

Bird brain from the age of dinosaurs reveals roots of avian intelligence (cam.ac.uk)
A ‘one of a kind’ fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate evolution.

Paleontology, Evolution, Birds, Dinosaurs, Neuroscience

124 points by gmays 61 days ago | 6 comments

Why are Indian and African wildlife so similar? (wanderingthru.com)
How and why is Indian and African wildlife so similar? This is a question that we as guides often get asked when guests are interested in exploring these two special places. This not only includes the large mammals, but birds and vegetation too.

Wildlife, India, Africa, Evolution, Biodiversity

6 points by rkwz 62 days ago | 3 comments

Mitochondria Are Alive (asimov.press)
The cells within our body are the remnants of an ancient alliance.

Biology, Science, Evolution

638 points by mailyk 70 days ago | 389 comments

The egg or the chicken? An ancient unicellular says egg (unige.ch)
A cell division resembling that of an animal embryo has been observed in a prehistoric unicellular organism, suggesting that embryonic development might have existed prior to the evolution of animals.

Evolution, Biology, Science, Cellular Biology

71 points by giuliomagnifico 72 days ago | 84 comments

World’s oldest tree? Genetic analysis traces evolution of iconic Pando forest (nature.com)
DNA samples from one of the world’s largest and oldest plants — a quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) in Utah called Pando — have helped researchers to determine its age and revealed clues about its evolutionary history.

Genetics, Trees, Science, Environment, Evolution

119 points by pseudolus 74 days ago | 57 comments

The evolutionary mystery of the German cockroach (johnhawks.net)
The species evolved to exploit human-built environments and exists nowhere else. So where did it come from?

Evolution, Biology, Insects, Urban Environments

96 points by softwaredoug 76 days ago | 18 comments

The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized (quantamagazine.org)
Three billion years ago, life on Earth was simple. Single-celled organisms ruled, and there wasn’t much to them. They were what we now call prokaryotic cells, which include modern-day bacteria and archaea, essentially sacks of loose molecular parts. They swirled together in shallow, primordial brews or near deep-sea ocean vents, where they extracted energy from the environment and reproduced by dividing one cell into two daughter cells.

Biology, Evolution, Cell Biology

69 points by elsewhen 80 days ago | 15 comments

The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized (quantamagazine.org)
Three billion years ago, life on Earth was simple. Single-celled organisms ruled, and there wasn’t much to them. They were what we now call prokaryotic cells, which include modern-day bacteria and archaea, essentially sacks of loose molecular parts. They swirled together in shallow, primordial brews or near deep-sea ocean vents, where they extracted energy from the environment and reproduced by dividing one cell into two daughter cells.

Biology, Evolution, Science

17 points by isaacfrond 81 days ago | 1 comments

The electrostatic world of insects (wired.com)
Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen, and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

Insects, Static Electricity, Biology, Evolution, Science

198 points by noleary 81 days ago | 49 comments

Preserved tracks suggest non-avian dinosaurs used their wings to run (newscientist.com)
Tiny tracks in South Korea symbolise a moment 120 million years ago when a dinosaur took advantage of its wings to cover ground in large leaps – the oldest track evidence of wing-assisted movement in these extinct animals.

Paleontology, Dinosaurs, Evolution, Science, Biology

9 points by nobody9999 85 days ago | 2 comments

Scientists predict and witness evolution in a 30-year marine snail experiment (phys.org)
Snails on a tiny rocky islet evolved before scientists' eyes. The marine snails were reintroduced after a toxic algal bloom wiped them out from the skerry. While the researchers intentionally brought in a distinct population of the same snail species, these evolved to strikingly resemble the population lost over 30 years prior.

Science, Evolution, Biology, Marine Biology, Experiments

42 points by gmays 87 days ago | 107 comments

Adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia on the Tibetan Plateau (sciencealert.com)
Humans are not yet done cooking. We're continuing to evolve and adjust to the world around us, the records of our adaptations written in our bodies.

Evolution, Genetics, Biology, Human Adaptation, Tibet

43 points by amichail 88 days ago | 79 comments

Teeth (thepointmag.com)
Teeth are our meeting place with the outside world, the point of attack. Crystalline and mineral in nature, teeth show us at our most mollusk-like. The fact that we can grow them, lose them and grow them again (if only once) seems to ally us with reptiles and the largest of the cartilaginous fish. Yet few things mark us more intimately as mammals than our teeth.

Biology, Evolution, Human Body

5 points by gmays 93 days ago | 1 comments

City microbes surviving on disinfectants, research reveals (phys.org)
New research shows microbes in our cities are evolving to resist the very cleaners we use to eliminate them. It also identifies novel strains living in Hong Kong that were previously only found in Antarctic desert soil.

Microbiology, Urban Environments, Environmental Science, Evolution, Antibiotic Resistance

9 points by pseudolus 93 days ago | 0 comments

Platybelodon (wikipedia.org)
Platybelodon ("flat-spear tusk") is an extinct genus of large herbivorous proboscidean mammals related to modern-day elephants, placed in the "shovel tusker" family Amebelodontidae.

Paleontology, Extinct Animals, Mammals, Evolution

9 points by thunderbong 95 days ago | 0 comments

Alien worlds might not have a night and day. How would that change evolution? (bbc.com)
Distinct days and nights have helped life flourish on Earth. But many alien worlds capable of supporting life may not have such clear delineations.

Astronomy, Biology, Evolution, Exoplanets

6 points by ranit 97 days ago | 0 comments

Darwin was no atheist, he didn't say humans came from monkeys (theguardian.com)
Everyone has heard of Charles Darwin. Yet it is a sad fact that a good part of what most people think and believe about the man is wrong. So many myths and legends have cropped up since his death that it is difficult to disentangle fact from fiction. Here are some of the most common misconceptions.

Science, Misconceptions, Evolution

8 points by teleforce 106 days ago | 2 comments