How does evolution work?

Most people have some pretty vague ideas about what evolution is, but most of us don’t really know how evolution actually happens.

(Some people even claim evolution isn’t real, but that’s about as sane as saying the Earth is flat, or that the Phantom Menace is better than the Empire Strikes Back).

In this post I’ll try and explain how evolution happens as simply as possible, and tell you why in the future human’s won’t evolve six fingers, wings, or two heads.

Genetics Made Simple – a quick video

This is great a three and a half minute video that covers the basic ideas in genetics:

It’s made by a guy called David Murawsky, see his Vimeo channel here

Panspermia: did life on Earth come from space? – Part 2, intentional panspermia & cosmic amino acids

Panspermia is the idea that life could have emerged on an alien planet, and then could have travelled through space to Earth, where it flourished and evolved into all the life we see today. So you, your family and your cat could all be aliens.

In the first post I looked at the idea that this alien life could have been simple bacteria, and could have travelled to Earth early in its history either in spores or in asteroids or comets. This is very much the ‘traditional view’ of panspermia.

In this post I’ll look at some alternative forms of panspermia, such as the idea that intelligent aliens may have deliberately seeded Earth with life.

An introduction to life

Life is important to astrobiologists. They spend a lot of time looking for it, on Mars and even further afield. But what is life? Surely that’s a simple question to answer, you can tell if something is alive just by looking at it, rocks aren’t alive, cats are. For most people that’s enough. But this can be an interesting question, even for people who aren’t pedants.