If evolution selects for the fittest organisms, why do we still have imperfections? Scientists at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath investigating this question have found that in species with small ...
Evolution
Sep 9, 2020
4
233
Researchers led by Manfred Gahr of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen have investigated the relationship of bird families. For the first time, they have been able to clarify the relationship of all families ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 11, 2020
0
622
Asterids comprise around 100,000 flowering plants, from heather to tomatoes. Up to now, their family relationships had not yet been fully clarified. A new study by the University of Bonn, Pennsylvania State University (U.S.) ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 5, 2020
0
134
Classical quantitative genetics has found that most phenotypes are polygenic traits. Under this polygenic model, natural selection often acts on many loci simultaneously, resulting in the combination of a few loci with major ...
Ecology
Jul 8, 2020
0
90
One in three women in Europe inherited the receptor for progesterone from Neandertals—a gene variant associated with increased fertility, fewer bleedings during early pregnancy and fewer miscarriages. This is according ...
Evolution
May 27, 2020
0
1912
Poultry geneticists have long studied the inheritance of a prized fancy chicken breeding trait; feathered legs.
Evolution
Apr 29, 2020
0
95
Biologists have long hoped to understand the nature of the earliest living organisms on Earth. If they could, they might then be able to say something about how, when, and where life arose on Earth, and perhaps by extension, ...
Evolution
Apr 22, 2020
4
466
During the past decade, our human evolutionary tree has turned into something more resembling an unwieldy bush. Scientists have discovered swapped segments of DNA that we shared from mating between two other hominids, Neanderthals ...
Evolution
Jan 15, 2020
0
325
Vision is a crucial sense for most animals, and vertebrates have evolved a highly adaptable set of opsin genes that generate light-sensitive pigments to decode the retinal image. These opsins include a rod opsin to help see ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 9, 2020
0
179
One of the leading threats to lakes since the rise of agriculture are runoffs from fertilizer, in the form of high phosphorus levels. These can trigger devastating events like eutrophication, where deadly algal blooms thrive ...
Evolution
Jan 9, 2020
2
160
