Evolution highlights XX

The members of one species of Darwin's finches on one Galapagos island is perhaps speciating themselves to death.

Here's a slightly confusing story of how the evolution of the wheel is similar to the evolution of running. I think.

Sergey Gavrilets, who works on modeling and is interested some of the same things that I am, has a new paper out in PLoS Computational Biology about a model on the evolution of cell differentiation.

The results show that division of labor can occur if two conditions are met: there must be strong genetic relatedness and fitness trade-offs preventing individual cells from performing multiple functions efficiently.

Via DailyScience. That smells very familiar (more on why that is later).