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elephants holding instruments

Most animals can’t keep a beat despite what Darwin believed

3 April 2019

Humans turn out to have the strongest sense of rhythm of all animals, says a new book, which makes strong evolutionary connections between music and language


chimp

A chimp's hug shows it's time to accept that animals have feelings too

3 April 2019

In Mama’s Last Hug, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that we can no longer deny that animals have feelings and we need to look closely at their inner lives


puppeteers

The Wider Earth review – Darwin's Beagle days make a gripping play

7 November 2018

An unusual venue stages an intriguing play about Darwin's Beagle days as London's Natural History Museum turns theatrical–with superb puppets as exotic wildlife


twins

Review: The Tangled Tree and Lamarck's Revenge are genetic misfits

24 October 2018

Two new books make big claims, but prove only that reports of the death of Darwinism have been greatly exaggerated


Don't miss pic

Don't miss: Darwinian premiere, what's really real and sun science

26 September 2018

London's Natural History museum gets a new theatre, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe gets a book and the biggest exhibition about our star


Letters from Charles Darwin

'Radical’ new biography of Darwin is unreliable and inaccurate

21 August 2017

A. N. Wilson's error-strewn and tendentious portrayal of Charles Darwin as a "Victorian mythmaker" falls into old traps and digs new ones, finds John van Wyhe


bird of paradise

We may have the evolution of beauty completely wrong

3 May 2017

Many male animals sport dazzling displays to attract a mate. But a new book says we may have misunderstood Darwin – and this is all about arbitrary aesthetics


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