The Friends of Charles Darwin

Genetic evidence is shedding new light on the origins of horses in the New World, during a particularly hazy period in their evolution.

Eighty years ago, in July 1925, the mixture of religion, science and the public schools caught fire in Dayton, Tenn. The Scopes trial—or "Monkey Trial," as it was called—dominated headlines across the country. The trial lasted just a week, but the questions it raised are as divisive now as they were back then. NPR looks back at the Scopes trial, the events that led up to it and its aftermath.

Human settlers made it to the Americas 30,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new evidence. A team of scientists came to this controversial conclusion by dating human footprints preserved by volcanic ash in an abandoned quarry in Mexico. They say the first Americans may have arrived by sea, rather than by foot. The traditional view is that the continent's early settlers arrived around 11,000 years ago, by crossing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

Charles Darwin's country home in Kent is set to become a global attraction.

Down House, Downe, has been put forward by the Government as the UK's 2006 nomination for World Heritage Site status.

If it is selected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), it will rank among other sites such as the Peruvian Inca ruins Machu Picchu and the Amazon rainforest.

Before the Government submits its application in February, residents are being consulted on the proposal, which also includes Downe and Cudham villages and the High Elms Country Park.

Two-hundred years ago today, on 5th July 1805, Robert FitRoy was born in Ampton, Surrey.

The first humans to arrive in Australia destroyed the pristine landscape, probably by lighting huge fires, the latest research suggests. The evidence, published in Science magazine, comes from ancient eggshells. These show birds changed their diets drastically when humans came on the scene, switching from grass to the type of plants that thrive on scrubland. The study supports others that have blamed humans for mass extinctions across the world 10-50,000 years ago.

A voracious relative of the jellyfish, which uses fluorescent red tentacles to entice prey to a stinging death, has been discovered deep in the ocean. The scarlet lures on this fragile predator suggests that red light, thought to be invisible to animals at these depths, may in fact be important in deep sea ecology.

On 10 July 1925, a drama was played out in a small courtroom in a Tennessee town that touched off a far-reaching ideological battle. John Scopes, a schoolteacher, was found guilty of teaching evolution… Despite the verdict, Scopes, and the wider scientific project he sought to promote, seemed at the time to have been vindicated by the backlash in the urban press against his creationist opponents.

Yet 80 years on, creationist ideas have a powerful hold in the US, and science is still under attack. US Supreme Court decisions have made it impossible to teach divine creation as science in state-funded schools. But in response, creationists have invented "intelligent design", which they say is a scientific alternative to Darwinism (see "A sceptic's guide to intelligent design"). ID has already affected the way science is taught and perceived in schools, museums, zoos and national parks across the US.

…As Darwin was trying to figure out how new species could evolve from old species, he began to think of evolution as a tree. He scribbled some simple branches in a notebook, and then published a more elaborate one in The Origin of Species. Darwin didn't actually put any animals or plants on the branches of these trees; he was just thinking about the process itself. Today, though, evolutionary trees are a common sight in scientific journals, whether scientists are reconstructing the origin of a new strain of HIV or are trying to figure out how animals evolved from single-celled ancestors.

The Himalayan snow lotus has been sent down an ever shrinking evolutionary path. And it's all down to people picking large flowers for herbal remedies and tourist souvenirs, according to a botanical survey.

A new species of deep-sea animal has been discovered, which uses glowing red tentacles to lure small fish to their deaths, Science magazine reports. The species, which has not yet been named, belongs to the genus Erenna, which is a member of the group that contains corals and jellyfish.

Two natural wonders of Africa have been added to a list of protected World Heritage sites by the United Nations. The world's largest and oldest meteorite crater, the Vredefort Dome, in South Africa was added for its scenic and scientific interest. Egypt's Wadi al-Hitan, known as Whale Valley, was listed for its amazing fossil remains of now-extinct whales.

Despite invasions by Saxons, Romans, Vikings, Normans, and others, the genetic makeup of today's white Britons is much the same as it was 12,000 ago, a new book claims.

Australopithecus afarensis, the early human who lived about 3.2 million years ago, walked upright, according to an "evolutionary robotics" model.

An expansive ecosystem of knee-high mud volcanoes, snowy microbial mats and flourishing clam communities lies beneath the collapsed Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica, say researchers.

A team of scientists has discovered a tiny caterpillar in Hawaii that binds snails with silk webbing before devouring them whole.

Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb is a lucid book that restores subtlety to evolutionary theory, says Steven Rose.

[…R]esearchers studying a family of butterflies think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed species. The team, from Harvard University, US, discovered that closely related species living in the same geographical space displayed unusually distinct wing markings. These wing colours apparently evolved as a sort of "team strip", allowing butterflies to easily identify the species of a potential mate.

The giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands inspired Charles Darwin to formulate his theory of natural selection to describe the evolutionary diversity of species. Now those tortoises have been found to be even more diverse than Darwin knew. Nearly 150 years after Darwin's most important work, scientists have found the tortoise Geochelone nigra, found on the Galapagos island of Santa Cruz, is not one species but three.

A new species of insect may have arisen in an evolutionary eye-blink as a result of cross-species mating. The discovery suggests that hybridisation—well known to be an important force in producing new plant species - may also be widespread in animals. Until now, it had been assumed that new animal species almost always arise by gradually splitting off from an existing lineage. The probable new species belongs to a group of flies known as fruit maggots—highly specialised fruit parasites in which each species infests its own particular plant species.

The oldest embryos ever discovered reveal that some early dinosaurs crawled on four legs before learning to stand on two later in life. A 190-million-year-old batch of perfectly preserved prosauropod eggs also provides some of the earliest and most compelling evidence that adult dinosaurs nurtured their young, providing food and protection until they could fend for themselves.

The molecular building blocks of life had already formed by the time the universe was only a quarter of its present age, new observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal. The research bolsters the case for extraterrestrial life and may shed light on the nature of galaxies in the early universe.

Predatory dinosaurs may have had the same type of super-efficient respiratory systems found in modern birds, according to a recent study. The high-powered oxygen pumps could have boosted dinosaur metabolisms, enabling meat-eaters, such as Velociraptor, T. rex, and others, to be active and effective hunters.

Review of Adapting Minds: Evolutionary psychology and the persistent quest for human nature by David J Buller.

The desire among romantically inclined males to serenade loved ones with the strains of a violin is not just a human trait. Scientists have discovered that a colourful, South American sparrow-like bird uses a similar technique to woo its potential partners. Using high-speed cameras, researchers have shown that the male club-winged manakin makes its bizarre "violin hum" by rubbing together specially adapted feathers.

Tiny fossil embryos curled up inside a clutch of African dinosaur eggs nearly 200 million years old hint at a remarkable story of evolution, scientists report—the transformation of an early tribe of plant-eating animals only a few feet long that became, over millions of years, the largest animals ever to walk the Earth. The body design of the embryos suggests that as hatchlings, those young dinosaurs were obliged to walk on four legs, but grew up as two-legged adults, the scientists say, while the lumbering, long-necked animals that succeeded them were four-legged all their lives. And from the absence of teeth in the fossil embryos, the scientists who analyzed them have deduced that the babies must have been born unable to feed themselves -- meaning, perhaps, that a loving mother's tender care does indeed have ancient origins.