u/dune-man

Note: I’m not posting these questions with the hope of finding answers. I just want to know if some people share my curiosity :D

1. How did life originate?

2. What is the definition of life?

3. How did cellular structures and biochemical pathways evolve? Is it possible to develop a field comparable to evolutionary developmental biology or comparative anatomy, but focused on cell and molecular biology?

4. What kinds of dinosaurs lived in what is now Iran?

5. What did Spinosaurus actually look like?

6. What did skin of T.rex look like? Feathers? Scales? Both?

7. How did Pterosaurs and Dinosaurs originate?

8. What really sets humans apart from other living organisms?

9. Why did the human brain evolve the way it did? What is the evolutionary purpose of human intelligence?

10. Why did Whales and Ichthyosaurs evolve gigantic body sizes so early in their evolutionary history?

11. Is evolution predictable?

12. Does life follow a predictable evolutionary path on every planet?

13. What is humanity’s place in the history of life?

14. What is the place of life within the non-living universe?

15. How can we anticipate and stop future Viruses before they emerge?

16. Where do Viruses truly belong in the tree of life? Where did they come from? Are all Viruses merely parasites, or do they play a deeper role that we have not yet fully understood?

17. How did Dinosaurs evolve into birds?

18. What did Andrewsarchus really look like?

19. What is the natural mating system of humans?

20. How could we build a society that minimizes—or perhaps even eliminates—sexual conflict in humans?

21. What is consciousness?

22. How does the brain construct and process its representation of the world?

23. Could DNA itself be considered a system that processes information about its environment and responds through adaptation, in a way that is loosely analogous to the brain?

24. Could the Buddhist concept of emptiness be applied to biology, suggesting that none of our biological definitions have an objective existence independent of our own conceptual framework?

25. What is the biological definition of an individual? What actually qualifies something as an individual in biology?

26. Homo sapiens has existed for at least 250,000 years, yet civilization emerged only within the last 10,000 years. What prevented humans from developing civilizations throughout most of their history? Could other human species have developed civilizations as well? If so, why didn’t they?

27. Why were placental mammals able to spread from Africa across Eurasia and eventually into the Americas, but not from Asia into Australia? What prevented them from colonizing Australia in the same way?

28. Why did concealed ovulation and permanently enlarged breasts evolve in human females, when most other female mammals have obvious signs of ovulation and develop enlarged breasts only during lactation?

29. Why did so many megafaunal species disappear around the end of the last Ice Age? What caused the widespread extinction of large mammals such as mammoths, Smilodon, and the short-faced bear across different continents?

30. Inclusive fitness theory suggests that helping genetically related individuals can increase an individual’s evolutionary success. Why, then, does kin-selected cooperation generally stop at close relatives rather than extending to all members of the same species—or even to more distantly related organisms, since all life shares some degree of common ancestry?

Hi. I'm a master’s student in Animal biosystematics. I know all of the basics about phylogenetic analysis and even a little bit more, since our professors has introduced us to some concepts and programs. But I don't feel like it's enough. I need to learn how to download data (like DNA sequences) and then make a tree, write a paper and then publish it. I need to be able to conduct research and publish it on my own. I need to learn a lot of concepts (like bayesian inference) and programs (TNT, R, etc.) from scratch.

What is the best way to learn these skills?

I think an online class would be the best, although I haven't found any. Can you recommend any? Also, there is no perfect book to teach these skills. Most books are either too old or too incomplete. And there are also thousands of papers and Youtube videos. There is an ocean of resources out there, yet it's so disorganised that I can't find what I'm looking for.

Just found out she has only fans