Our world is a frantic, intellectually combustible place. Opinions are 10 a penny in the age of Twitter. Mature reflection does not play a major part in public discourse. Knee-jerk reaction?

A species of giant tortoise that disappeared after being heavily hunted in the Galapagos more than a century ago may still be living on an island 200 miles away, a study has found.

A spirit of free comedy has broken out in Edinburgh as performers and festival-goers shun expensive venues in favour of free shows to reflect straitened times – without cutting back on laughs.

The National Museum of Scotland opens its doors today after completing a three-year, £47m makeover.

With its trademark flippers and comical mating dance, the blue-footed booby is one of the most commonly sighted birds on the Galapagos Islands.

The blast furnaces that powered the Industrial Revolution had only just begun belching clouds of carbon into the sky when, in 1860, Charles Darwin encouraged a Victorian nobleman to maintain accurate data on an intriguing herd of cattle living feral in the grounds of his medieval castle.

This past 150 years are widely seen as the golden age of biology – when it began to seem that all life is understandable and will soon be understood; and that what can be understood can and should be controlled for our own benefit. In 1859, in the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin first explained the mechanism of evolution "by means of natural selection". Then Gregor Mendel described the units of heredity now known as genes; then, in the early decades of the 20th century, Darwin's notions were fused with Mendel's to create "neodarwinism" – evolution conceived as a shift in the content of gene pools of populations.

An account of the 10 greatest inventions of evolution has won this year's Royal Society Science Book Prize, which may be the last time the awards are given following the failure to find a sponsor.

Another week, another extraordinary feat of endurance. Former British Army captain Ed Stafford, 34, of Hallaton in Leicestershire has become the first man to walk the entire length of the Amazon river, some 6,000 miles from Mount Mismi in Peru to Belem in Brazil. It took 859 days – and, he says, 50,000 mosquito bites – during which time he was imprisoned for murder, chased by Ashaninka Indians and had his mouth filled with concrete by locals who thought he was prospecting for oil. But even he didn't have to face the peril that Walter Kaiser, a 59-year-old Austrian, endured while climbing the Hochkesslekopf. He tumbled 50ft after being hit by a falling goat. He felt a bit sheepish.

Denis Dutton's big idea is that the human love of art can be explained by Darwinism. All the standard explanations of why we value art – because it's expressive, because it's informative, because of its formal qualities – are mere fragments of explanations, which only make sense in the context of our evolutionary history.

This eloquent and incisive book about the uses of acute hypochondria takes as its focus nine noble minds trapped in bodies they treated as treacherous enemies.