Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

The origin of the eukaryotic cell, with its compartmentalized nature and generally large size compared with bacterial and archaeal cells, represents a cornerstone event in the evolution of complex ...

The story of Charles Darwin’s life. His theory of evolution changed the way we understood our place in the world.

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun ...

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

Something written in every biology textbook of the past 70 years may need a rewrite. Not because the science was careless, or the scientists were wrong to try – but because the tools available at the ...

A biochemist, building on the pillars of evolutionary theory and drawing on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and genes, argues that the evolution of multicellular life was the result ...

In his 1989 book Wonderful Life, the late Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould imagined rewinding life’s history to an early ...

The emergence of the first biopolymers and their building blocks on the early Earth is considered a key moment in the origin of life (OoL), but how life began on the prebiotic Earth from a pile of ...

For decades, many scientists have relied on the "hard steps" model to suggest that intelligent life is rare — the improbable result of a series of unlikely evolutionary leaps. But new research by ...

Paleontologists who study earth’s ancient fossil record might not seem to be the obvious choice when asking about the prevalence of intelligent life in the cosmos. But paleontology, the study of ...

One of the world’s most influential and enduring popular science books has reached its 50th anniversary with barely any need ...