And man made life: Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived. The world's first man-made life form: Be afraid? From Edge, a special issue on Craig Venter and the creation of synthetic life, with comments by Freeman Dyson, Kevin Kelly, George Dyson (and more at Popular Mechanics). Jamais Casio on what is and what isn't going on here. Let there be life: Five possible implications of Craig Venter's creation of synthetic organisms. How the extinction of the dinosaurs, Arctic methane leaks, and nuclear weaponry reveal the precarious thresholds of life on Earth. Procreative sex may soon be a quaint relic: With advances in laboratory-based reproduction, sex will be optional for humans. Research suggests male physical competition, not attraction, was central in winning mates among human ancestors. Breeding the perfect bull: A Texas cattleman used genetic science to breed his masterpiece, a near-perfect Red Angus bull — then nature took its course. Junk DNA was once thought to be little more than gibberish, evolutionary debris that puffed up our genomes — we're starting to realise that it is more important than anyone realised. A proposal to change the formal name of Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, has significant implications for research in the life sciences (and more). From The Nation, a review of Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology by Mark V. Barrow Jr. and Rewilding the World: Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution by Caroline Fraser; and more on The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins and What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (and more and more and more and more). The first chapter from Evolution for Dummies by Greg Krukonis and Tracy Barr.
