How can a "thumbs up" sign help us remember five processes that impact evolution? The story of the Five Fingers of Evolution gives us a clever way of understanding change in gene pools over time.

Andrew Hessel is the Co-Chair of biotechnology and bioinformatics at Singularity University, an educational institution created to train leaders in exponential (fast-changing) technologies. He views living cells as powerful information processors that are programmable with genetic engineering. His personal focus is synthetic biology, a suite of tools that allow genomes to be manipulated with relative ease. Andrew is also the co-founder and managing director of the Pink Army Cooperative, a social biotechnology company working to create open source personalized breast cancer treatments.

Richard Dawkins interview at the University of Maryland by Cristian Castillo-Davis. April 6, 2011
Stamp Student Union
University of Maryland
College Park, MD

Professor Richard Dawkins visited Science World 2011 and presented some challenging new ideas about medicine and evolution to a packed out audience. Famous for his popular science books The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion; Dawkins changed track in this lecture and discussed the need for doctors and medical researchers to be mindful of evolution when treating and studying disease.

Featuring the author, Matt Ridley; with comments by Robin Hanson, Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University. Moderated by Brink Lindsey, Vice President for Research, Cato Institute.

Our economy is hurting, and many see environmental degradation as a looming threat. Unfortunately, the proposed solutions for getting humanity back on track are, in fact, rejections of the very factors that guided us from the poverty of our ancestors to the prosperity of today.

Aber Whitcomb co-founder of MySpace talks about the evolution of how content is created on the internet and the challenges with the growth of MySpace and social networking in general

Understanding of humans' earliest past often comes from studying fossils. They tell us much of what we know about the people who lived before us. There is one thing fossils cannot tell us; at what point did we stop living day-to-day and start to think symbolically, to represent ideas about our environment and how we could change it? At a dig in South Africa the discovery of a small piece of ochre pigment, 70,000 years old, has raised some very interesting questions.

After spending the first years of his life in an Anglican household in Nairobi, the path was in no way clear for Richard Dawkins to become a scientist. Here the legendary evolutionary biologist chronicles his passion for the field, describing his first discovery as well as his favorite research project.

11 videos from Big Think

Evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak and author Roger Highfield explain how cooperation and altruism fit into the larger evolutionary puzzle. Chaired by Jonathan Rowson.

TED collaborates with animator Andrew Park to illustrate Denis Dutton's provocative theory on beauty -- that art, music and other beautiful things, far from being simply "in the eye of the beholder," are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins.