The diversity of human languages can be likened to branches on a tree. If you’re reading this in English, you’re on a branch that traces back to a common ancestor with Scots, which traces back to a more distant ancestor that split off into German and Dutch. Moving further in, there’s the European branch that […]
Santa Fe Institute
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Researchers publish new theory of life’s multiple origins
The history of life on Earth has often been likened to a four-billion-year-old torch relay. One flame, lit at the beginning of the chain, continues to pass on life in the same form all the way down. But what if life is better understood on the analogy of the eye, a convergent organ that evolved […]
Posted inSci/Tech
Tiny worlds reveal fundamental drivers of abundance, diversity
September 23, 2020 – The natural world is astonishingly complex. After centuries of study, scientists still have much to learn about how all the species in an ecosystem coexist, for example. New research on microbial communities published in Nature Communications helps light the way to answering this fundamental question in ecology. “What I wanted to know is, […]