But the lives of spotted hyenas, she has concluded, share some profound similarities with our own. In both species, a complex social world has driven the evolution of a big, complex brain. [NYT]
As I mentioned in the first installment of this series, mutations are the raw material for evolution, the ultimate source of innovation: without them, eyes could not get keener, nor feathers snazzier. Yet mutations are also a product of evolution. Which is to say, the rate at which you have mutations is a trait like any other — height, bushiness of eyebrows, number of tentacles and so on — and like any other trait, it can, and does, evolve. [NYT]
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