Biological evolution is the heritable change in characteristics of biological populations over successive generations, driven by mechanisms such as mutation, recombination, genetic drift, gene flow, and natural and sexual selection. It operates through changes in allele frequencies within gene pools, constrained and shaped by developmental, physiological, and ecological contexts. Evolutionary processes generate adaptation, diversification, and extinction, producing hierarchical patterns from microevolutionary shifts within populations to macroevolutionary dynamics among lineages. At the molecular level, evolution involves sequence variation, genomic rearrangements, and changes in gene regulation, which collectively underlie phenotypic diversity and the emergence of complex biological organization.
The downstream consequences of religion, politics and war can have far-reaching effects on the environment and on the evolutionary processes affecting urban organisms, according to a new analysis from Washington University ...
Evolution
Jul 2, 2025
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What can a tiny wasp with a rather gruesome parasitic life cycle teach us about evolution, behavior and human developmental diseases? In a new paper, researchers led by István Mikó and Holly Hoag at the University of New ...
Evolution
Jul 1, 2025
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The human body is a machine whose many parts—from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain—have been assembled in fits and starts over the 4 billion years of our history.
Evolution
Jul 1, 2025
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Polyploidy, or whole-genome duplication (WGD), is a major mechanism of genome evolution across the tree of life and is particularly prevalent in plants, where it facilitates the evolution of new traits.
Plants & Animals
Jun 27, 2025
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Parental egg-care in fish traps them in an evolutionary dead-end through the loss of the chorion-hardening system, according to scientists from the Institute of Science Tokyo. Fish have diverse egg-caring strategies that ...
Evolution
Jun 27, 2025
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The Cambrian explosion was an extraordinary phenomenon in the evolution of life on the planet that led to the emergence of many animal phyla and the diversification of species. During this period, some 530 million years ago, ...
Evolution
Jun 26, 2025
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In general, evolution is a long, slow process of tiny changes passed down over generations, resulting in new adaptations and even new species over thousands or millions of years. But when living things are faced with dramatic ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 26, 2025
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For over a century, scientists have puzzled over a fundamental mystery in our evolutionary history: how did mammals go from sprawling like lizards to striding like cats and dogs? This transition—from a sprawled stance (like ...
Evolution
Jun 24, 2025
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A trade-off between tooth size and jaw mobility has restricted fish evolution, Nick Peoples at the University of California Davis, US, and colleagues report in the open-access journal PLOS Biology .
Evolution
Jun 24, 2025
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On the younger, black-rock islands of the Galápagos archipelago, wild-growing tomatoes are doing something peculiar. They're shedding millions of years of evolution, reverting to a more primitive genetic state that resurrects ...
Evolution
Jun 24, 2025
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