The story of life: critical insights from evolutionary biology.

The notion that humans, in all their complexity, are merely an evolutionary accident, an insignificant speck in a boundless cosmos, is deeply unsatisfying for most nonscientists and fails to resonate with their life experience. What, then, can evolutionary biology ultimately tell us about the meaning of our lives? In conversation with Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, paleoanthropologists Melanie Lee Chang and Ian Tattersall, and paleontologist Simon Conway Morris share their insights on these competing concepts and explain how meaning and purpose can be gleaned from the remarkable story of life itself.

How to make stone soup: Is the "Paleo diet" a missed opportunity for anthropologists?

For the past few years, people everywhere have been "going Paleo." Websites and social media touting the benefits of eating a "Paleo diet" and following a "Paleolithic life style" serve as calls to arms for health-conscious individuals seeking information about the latest health and fitness trends. Many of these people participate in programs such as Crossfit, which involve major social and life-style modification components and therefore facilitate the dissemination of dietary fads.

Variation in genes related to cochlear biology is strongly associated with adult-onset deafness in border collies.

Domestic dogs can suffer from hearing losses that can have profound impacts on working ability and quality of life. We have identified a type of adult-onset hearing loss in Border Collies that appears to have a genetic cause, with an earlier age of onset (3-5 years) than typically expected for aging dogs (8-10 years). Studying this complex trait within pure breeds of dog may greatly increase our ability to identify genomic regions associated with risk of hearing impairment in dogs and in humans.

Large-scale SNP genotyping with canine buccal swab DNA.

The dog is an attractive model for genetic studies of complex disease. With drafts of the canine genome complete, a large number of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are potentially useful for gene-mapping studies and empirical estimations of canine diversity and linkage disequilibrium (LD) are now available. Unfortunately, most canine SNPs remain uncharacterized, and the amount and quality of DNA available from population-based samples are limited.