Backyard feeders plus a strange sense of direction may have begun to split one bird species into two.

In southern Germany, some 10 percent of blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) fly not south, toward warmth, but rather northwest for the winter, says evolutionary biologist H. Martin Schaefer of the University of Freiburg in Germany. This novel journey, on record since the 1960s, probably became survivable thanks to the rise of backyard bird feeding in Britain, he says. Enthusiasts setting out seed and suet have kept the birds from starving until it’s time to wing back to Germany to nest.

Despite the popularity of cultural evolution as an idea, with cultures as organisms and memes as genes, the actual science has lagged.

But by applying the tools of population genetics to Polynesian boat designs, researchers show that cultural evolution might be studied as rigorously as the beaks of finches.

Time always marches forward — and so does evolution, according to a new study showing that protein changes that happened over the course of tens of millions of years can prevent molecular turnarounds and render evolution irreversible.

Viewing the primates on show at the Natural History Museum, I suddenly wonder if they mind the crowd of onlookers viewing their every activity, so I turn on the intercom to ask him. "It can be a bit distracting," concedes specimen A.

"But we asked for the intercom to be installed – otherwise it would feel too much like living in a goldfish bowl," he adds, before returning to the plant samples he was preparing for the museum's collection.

Specimen A is just one of the many scientists on display in the new Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum, London, open to the public on 15 September.

Scientists at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) have traced the evolution of the four-chambered human heart to a common genetic factor linked to the development of hearts in turtles and other reptiles.

The research, published in the September 3 issue of the journal Nature, shows how a specific protein that turns on genes is involved in heart formation in turtles, lizards and humans.

"This is the first genetic link to the evolution of two, rather than one, pumping chamber in the heart, which is a key event in the evolution of becoming warm-blooded," said Gladstone investigator Benoit Bruneau, PhD, who led the study. "The gene involved, Tbx5, is also implicated in human congenital heart disease, so our results also bring insight into human disease."

Intricate cellular components are often cited as evidence of intelligent design. They couldn’t have evolved, I.D. proponents say, because they can’t be broken down into smaller, simpler functional parts. They are irreducibly complex, so they must have been intentionally designed, as is, by an intelligent entity.

But new research comparing mitochondria, which provide energy to animal cells, with their bacterial relatives, shows that the necessary pieces for one particular cellular machine — exactly the sort of structure that’s supposed to prove intelligent design — were lying around long ago. It was simply a matter of time before they came together into a more complex entity.

We humans have let loose something extraordinary on our planet - a third replicator - the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous. 

What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

We humans have let loose something extraordinary on our planet - a third replicator - the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

WHEN Darwin unveiled his theory of evolution, the earliest known fossils lay in rocks belonging to what Darwin called the Silurian age. Older rocks seemed devoid of fossils. The apparently sudden appearance of sophisticated animals such as trilobites did not fit in with Darwin's idea of gradual evolution.

"If my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited... the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer," Darwin wrote in the first edition of On the Origin of Species. His conundrum is known as Darwin's dilemma.

Of course, we have since discovered innumerable fossils from far earlier periods. Rocks as old as 3.8 billion years contain signs of life, and the first recognisable bacteria appear in rocks 3.5 billion years old. Multicellular plants in the form of red and green algae appear around a billion years ago, followed by the first multicellular animals about 575 million years ago, during the Ediacaran (see "The rise of animals").