The pronghorn--only twenty million years old. An eco-critic details the progress of North America's speediest megafauna and the human advances that threaten it.

If 60 percent of human conversation is about nothing in particular, the author wonders what the role of language is and how it came about.

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: like Darwin, but more fun. Decades before The Origin of Species, an eccentric Frenchman flounders on the edge of discovery.

Darwin surprised the world with a runaway best seller, beating Alfred Russel Wallace to the punch and outshining the Beagle's esteemed captain.

In the shadow of a T. rex, one artist ponders what it means to trace a history, and whether future generations will trace ours.

Meteorites and creation: Scientists uncover the beginnings of life at Lake Acraman's ancient impact site.

At the Great Salt Lake, a mother encounters Robert Smithson's famed Spiral Jetty and documents our failure to record change, evolutionary and otherwise.

Walking away from evolution may not be the best thing for us. At Macchu Pichu, the writer contemplates the price of our immobility.

Parisian stabbings and palm tree seeds. Statistics may be predictable, but they predict nothing in individual cases: The author pits choice against determinism

If the stars weren’t fixed, would our minds unravel? A lover of natural metaphors wonders where we’d be without them.

What modes of thinking was Darwin responding to? Part of his genius may very well have lain in resolving the conceptual schizophrenia of his predecessors.

A childhood believer critiques the way supporters of intelligent design and creationism attempt to give their faith scientific credence.

An entomologist determines that a colleague’s fear of chemicals is not so different from the migration of horn flies to the belly of a cow.

Not long ago, Western Australia's wheatbelt was a wasteland. Now private conservationists are restoring both the habitat and its marsupial citizens.

How does a father relinquish control? In the aftermath of a Cape-side mishap, the writer realizes it’s not easy to ward off life’s inevitable dangers.

Arsonists are always obsessive, so he won’t stop until he’s caught or the rain comes.

The grieving orphans and widows laughed loudest of all, and we joined them. It is probably difficult for you to accept this.

From that moment of death averted, of survival insured, Alain and the woman had been twisted together like cars in the wreck that hadn’t happened.

There’s something surreal about seeing an old friend when we know it’s for the last time.

We have fifteen hours to parade around the Public Square in our pointy boots, fifteen hours to forget what happened to Saunders, so we can help bury him.

You can’t know anybody in the brief overlaps of flimsy acquaintance, nor in any of the tenuous and fleeting opportunities for connection that we are afforded.

Barrett saw hoof prints in the packed red clay that was the floor. How fine it must be to take cover there in the dark.  

“So why there’s no number to call? Which kind of business is that? It’s the business of they kidnap you for being a Jew!”

His bones have been telling him that his life is more than half over, it's time, it's time...He's tall, he's fully haired, and the ID is just a precaution.

One one such nocturnal walk, I began to imagine that I had in fact died in that shed, and simply did not know it yet.

She climbed on top of me and began to move. The Conjugal Cyst said that non-mitotic cells, no matter how elegant their motility, tended to die. It made me sad.