Bad guys really do get the most girls - sex - 18 June 2008 - New Scientist

Bad guys really do get the most girls - sex - 18 June 2008 - New Scientist: "Christopher von Rueden of the University of California at Santa Barbara says that the studies are important because they confirm that personality variation has direct fitness consequences."

In general, there's a selection criteria here -- why are females of this particular species selecting for this behavioral trait when it is likely to create a higher cost burden for them? It would seem that instead of directly selecting a mate based on a mate who can most directly contributed to high offspring survival, the mate selection seems to be selecting for a mate who's genetics will contribute most to offspring reproductive success. If an offspring has a high chance of survival to reproductive age, then the more important fitness criteria is the offspring's reproductive success rate.

It would be interesting to observe cultural implications more closely to see if even very subtle shifts in reproductive success do occur based on different cultural norms, which could in turn lead to slight changes in selected traits.

Synapses Found to Be More Complex Up the Evolutionary Scale - NYTimes.com

Synapses Found to Be More Complex Up the Evolutionary Scale - NYTimes.com: "But in fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. In worms and flies, the synapses mediate simple forms of learning, but in higher animals they are built from a much richer array of protein components and conduct complex learning and pattern recognition, Dr. Grant said."

This focuses just on the synapses, but the complexity of the chemical pathways may be similarly interesting.

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab - life - 09 June 2008 - New Scientist

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab - life - 09 June 2008 - New Scientist: "But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use."

This could be Nobel-worthy work. What's interesting is that it took 31,500 generations to adapt (and unclear from this article how many reproduction events that was). For complex organisms, 31,500 generations is far too slow to adapt to changes in the natural environment. Evolutionary processes presumably have evolved to work respond faster to environmental change in higher-level organisms.

Plants Found to Show Preferences for Their Relatives - NYTimes.com

Plants Found to Show Preferences for Their Relatives - NYTimes.com

Another example of how evolutionary processes themselves evolve.

Mind - Optical Illusions Show How Brain Anticipates the Future to ‘See’ the Present - NYTimes.com

Mind - Optical Illusions Show How Brain Anticipates the Future to ‘See’ the Present - NYTimes.com: "Scientists argue that the brain has evolved to see a split second into the future when it perceives motion. Because it takes the brain at least a tenth of a second to model visual information, it is working with old information. By modeling the future during movement, it is “seeing” the present."

Brain as anticipation engine is the central thesis of Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence".