Back on May 13th I wrote a post entitled “Evolutionary biology takes a hard look at IVF and human conception”. In it I suggested that aneuploidy – chromosomal abnormality – was in fact normal for human embryos and had evolved as a male strategy...
Deleterious genes for a number of life-threatening diseases which palpably affect human fitness appear to persist in the gene pool at perplexingly high frequencies when you would think they would be eradicated over time by purifying natural selection. Now a group of...
Something a little light-hearted for a change. Hui Liu, Linda J. Waite, Shannon Shen and Donna H. Wang have just published a report on the effect of regular and enjoyable sex in later life, in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour. It appears that, for men,...
Nearly 10% of the genome of all mammals is made up of viruses that infected mammalian ancestors eons ago. These retroviruses inserted their DNA into mammalian chromosomes and, while time has reduced many of them to useless genetic rubble, some of them, or fragments...
