Scientific American Magazine

Does natural selection drive evolution at levels higher than selfish genes and fertile individuals?

Contrary to popular belief, humans continue to evolve. Our bodies and brains are not the same as our ancestors' were—or as our descendants' will be

Understanding of evolution is fostering powerful technologies for health care, law enforcement, ecology, and all manner of optimization and design problems

Charles Darwin saw that random variations in organisms provide fodder for evolution. Modern scientists are revealing how that diversity arises from changes to DNA and can add up to complex creatures or even cultures

How biological hand-me-downs inherited from fish and tadpoles evolved into human maladies

A Victorian amateur undertook a lifetime pursuit of slow, meticulous observation and thought about the natural world, producing a theory 150 years ago that still drives the contemporary scientific agenda

Some evolutionary psychologists have made widely popularized claims about how the human mind evolved, but other scholars argue that the grand claims lack solid evidence

Biologists working with the most sophisticated genetic tools are demonstrating that natural selection plays a greater role in the evolution of genes than even most evolutionists had thought

A computer game illustrates the difference between building your own simulated creature and real-life natural selection

Some 180 years after unearthing the first human fossil, paleontologists have amassed a formidable record of our forebears

Creationists who want religious ideas taught as scientific fact in public schools continue to adapt to courtroom defeats by hiding their true aims under ever-changing guises