The human hand is undeniably a work of wonder. Its layout and suite of design features enable mankind―the only possessors of this particular arrangement of bones, tendons, muscles, and nerves―to type faster than 60 words per minute or swing a heavy hammer while holding a delicate potato chip. What would it take to duplicate a human hand?

Biologists recently discovered how tomcod…a smaller variation of cod…have thrived in the polluted waters of the Hudson River. The reports on their research are soaked in evolutionary jargon, but the data they dredged from the DNA of these and neighboring tomcod demonstrate that evolution had nothing to do with the fish's unexpected proliferation in poisoned waters.

Bones were discovered in a cave in Germany's Neander Valley in the middle 1800s. Since then, many more "Neandertal" remains have been uncovered. The story has been told that they wore no clothes, had a very primitive culture, and hunted animals with clubs as they evolved from an ape-like to a man-like creature. But is this an accurate picture?

Just one genus of flowering plant, Veronica, includes over 450 different species. They share similarities with other flower genera, some of which have radially symmetrical flowers and others with bilaterally symmetrical flower petal arrangements. Could varieties that look so different have descended from the same flower stock?

Darwinian evolution asserts that a single original organism morphed over countless generations into the modern known life forms. Each species alive today would therefore represent the tip of its own "branch" on a gigantic imaginary tree of life, with the hypothetical ancestor of all life forms situated at the base of the trunk.