Category: Biology

Before Darwin’s finches or Dawkins’s selfish genes, there was Malthus’s unsettling discovery about population growth. As a mathematician and economist in the late 1700s, he noticed something that seems obvious now but was revolutionary then: populations grow exponentially, but food production only grows linearly. Think about rabbits. Each pair can produce six babies per year.…

Darwin showed us that life evolves through natural selection. But something always bothered Richard Dawkins: What exactly was being selected? Everyone talked about the “survival of the fittest,” but fittest what? The simple insight is that it’s not really about individual organisms at all. It’s about genes. Think of it this way: Your body is…

Darwin spent five years sailing around the world on the Beagle, and everywhere he looked, he saw the same puzzle. Why did the Galápagos have so many types of finches, each with a different beak? Why did fossil armadillos in Argentina look so much like living ones? Why did island species differ from their mainland…