We humans tend to regard incest as deeply disturbing. It's a strong social taboo, and it's underpinned by sound biological reasoning. Mixing genes with a non-relative is beneficial because it increases genetic diversity, ...
Plants & Animals
May 19, 2021
1
5
We usually assume that inbreeding is bad and should be avoided under all circumstances. But new research performed by researchers at Stockholm University, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, shows that there is little ...
Plants & Animals
May 3, 2021
8
1371
For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today's Romania 35,000 years ago. Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa ...
Evolution
May 20, 2021
0
242
Something mysterious happened nearly half a billion years ago that triggered one of the most important changes in the history of life on Earth. Suddenly, there was an explosion of species, with the biodiversity of invertebrate ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 19, 2019
1
243
Climate change is causing a mass extinction the likes of which has not been seen in recorded history. For birds, this biodiversity loss has implications beyond just species loss. In research publishing in the journal Current ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 21, 2022
0
63
Ruffs are characterized by three supergene variants that lead to different appearances and courtship behavior in males. Whether these variants affect females was previously unknown. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 17, 2022
0
40
An overlooked and long-neglected type of forest has vast capacity to rebound, enhancing species diversity and resilience to climate change, according to an international team of forest scientists.
Plants & Animals
Mar 27, 2024
0
75
Over the course of only a century, humanity has made an observable impact on the genetic diversity of the lion population. That's the conclusion of a recently published study by Drs. Caitlin Curry and James Derr from the ...
Ecology
Nov 4, 2020
0
200
Humans evolved in Africa, along with chimpanzees, gorillas and monkeys. But primates themselves appear to have evolved elsewhere—likely in Asia—before colonizing Africa. At the time, around 50 million years ago, Africa ...
Evolution
Apr 30, 2021
0
93
In a paper published in Science Advances, an international team of researchers have examined traits of marine megafauna species to better understand the potential ecological consequences of their extinction under different ...
Ecology
Apr 17, 2020
6
534
