What is the point of philosophy of biology? This is the question that continued to come up as I thought, scribbled, and erased while writing this piece. This question has also been ever present for me since I first started seriously practicing the discipline. To be honest, I’m not really sure...

Measuring Biological Function in Biomechanics: Observations and Consequences

This study of 2420 children reveals that separation from a father through death, incarceration, or separation and/or divorce is associated with accelerated telomere shortening in his children.

Abstract. Comparative oncology investigates variation in cancer risk across species by analysing relationships between observed tumour prevalence and facto

In the first half of the 1980s I studied mathematics, as a mature student, at the University of Erlangen. In those days a first degree at a German university was a master’s complete with dissertati…

I’m reading The Paradox of the Organism, a set of collected essays on this notion edited by Arvid Ågren and Manus M. Patten. It’s tremendously enlightening. It is also pretty consistent with the st…

Our goal is to enhance understanding of phylogenetic endemism (PE), which is studied using a range-weighted phylogenetic tree. We present a new method called Range Weighted Branch Length Difference (R...

Abstract. The domestication of plants and animals permitted the development of cities and social hierarchies, as well as fostering cultural changes that ul

Abstract This essay revisits Charles Darwin’s reading of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay of the Principle of Population (6th ed., 1826), which furnished Darwin with the mechanism of natural selection. W...