Science

Beanbag genetics

Today a bitter dispute about the nature of biology is underway. A simple bag of beans may be what tips the balance

Zachary B Hancock

Forwards, not back

Medicine aims to return bodies to the state they were in before illness. But there’s a better way of thinking about health

Kate MacCord & Jane Maienschein

Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals

22 minutes

We are not machines

Welcome to the new post-genomic biology: a transformative era in need of fresh metaphors to understand how life works

Philip Ball

Kinship

Science must become attuned to the subtle conversations that pervade all life, from the primordial to the present

David Waltner-Toews

Artists of our own lives

The genome is the starting point for a performance we enact over a lifetime, not a blueprint we’ve got to follow

Richard O Prum

In 1886, a US agency set out to record new fruit varieties. The results are wondrous

5 minutes

Evolution without accidents

Despite advances in molecular genetics, too many biologists think that natural selection is driven by random mutations

James A Shapiro

What on earth is a xenobot?

The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks

Philip Ball

The web of life

Classic evolutionary theory holds that species separate over time. But it’s fuzzier than that – now we know they also merge

Juli Berwald

An idea with bite

The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking

J Arvid Ågren

Brains in a dish

What pea-sized brain organoids reveal about consciousness, the self and our future as a species

Alysson Muotri

The science of terrible men

The pioneers of social genetics were racists and eugenicists: should we give up on the science they founded altogether?

Kathryn Paige Harden

If trauma can be passed down, could new therapies blunt the transgenerational impact?

9 minutes

The genes we’re dealt

The new field of social genomics can be used by progressives to combat racial inequality or by conservatives to excuse it

Erik Parens

Choose your own birth

Every human is both an animal with a deep evolutionary history and an individual who must bring their existence into being

Ada Jaarsma

In the tug-of-war between mother and baby, the placenta is a life-giving referee

4 minutes

Consider the axolotl: our great hope of regeneration?

Scott Sayare

Like the emperor’s new clothes, DNA kits are a tailored illusion

George Estreich