Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made.

In a perfectly designed world —one with no history— we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.

But why live in these environments at all? What possessed fish to get out of the water or live in the margins? Think of this: virtually every fish swimming in these 375-million-year-old streams was a...

Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June,...

When the finely tuned balance among the different parts of bodies breaks down, the individual creature can die. A cancerous tumor, for example, is born when one batch of cells no longer cooperates with others....