Darwin's Unexpected Final Obsession - Worms

Very recommendable! Amazing stuff!

What is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution?

Recommendable!

Charles Darwin: Natural Selection | The Cell

Recommendable! Personally, I am not convinced of the "single cell" theory of the origin of life on Earth! Sounds too nice to be true!

The Senses of Plants

Very recommendable! Nice overview article!

"... As is often the case in biology, to find the roots of plant perception we must go back to Charles Darwin. Late in life, the naturalist published in 1880 what was to be one of his last books, The Power of Movement in Plants, in collaboration with his son Francis, a botanist. Expanding on earlier work on climbing plants, the two experimented with tropism—the attraction of plants to stimuli—and nutation—the differentiated growth of their various parts that moves them towards stimuli. ..."

The Senses of Plants | OpenMind

This weird trick will help you summon an army of earth worms to come to the surface

Recommendable! Charles Darwin studied this phenomenon for about 40 years, wrote a book about it and came up with the correct hypothesis.

For Darwin’s Galapagos finches, beak shape goes beyond evolution

Amazing stuff! Engineers and applied science researchers revisited the famous finches!

"... "Evolution selects from random mutations but how do these random mutations result in specific shapes that can perform specific functions,” ..."

From the abstract:

"Darwin’s finches are a classic example of adaptive radiation, exemplified by their adaptive and functional beak morphologies. To quantify their form, we carry out a morphometric analysis of the three-dimensional beak shapes of all of Darwin’s finches and find that they can be fit by a transverse parabolic shape with a curvature that increases linearly from the base toward the tip of the beak. The morphological variation of beak orientation, aspect ratios, and curvatures allows us to quantify beak function in terms of the elementary theory of machines, consistent with the dietary variations across finches. Finally, to explain the origin of the evolutionary morphometry and the developmental morphogenesis of the finch beak, we propose an experimentally motivated growth law at the cellular level that simplifies to a variant of curvature-driven flow at the tissue level and captures the range of observed beak shapes in terms of a simple morphospace. Altogether, our study illuminates how a minimal combination of geometry and dynamics allows for functional form to develop and evolve."

For Darwin’s finches, beak shape goes beyond evolution Research combines evolutionary biology with geometry, dynamics and function

Geometry and dynamics link form, function, and evolution of finch beaks (no public access. Courtesy of Google Scholar, here is the link to the PDF file)