Young genes found to adapt faster than old ones

A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön and the University of Sussex in the UK shows that the age of a gene determines how fast they adapt. These findings demonstrate how gene evolution ...

There's more than one way to grow a baby

In his 1989 book Wonderful Life, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that, if we could "replay the tape," life on Earth would evolve to be fundamentally different each time.

Scientists discover when beetles became prolific

Using a previously published and carefully curated 68-gene dataset, the scientists ran a battery of mathematical models to reconstruct the evolution of protein sequences—the results of which, have been published today in ...

A new theory of life's multiple origins

The history of life on Earth has often been likened to a four-billion-year-old torch relay. One flame, lit at the beginning of the chain, continues to pass on life in the same form all the way down. But what if life is better ...

How 'great' was the great oxygenation event?

Around 2.5 billion years ago, our planet experienced what was possibly the greatest change in its history: According to the geological record, molecular oxygen suddenly went from nonexistent to becoming freely available everywhere. ...

New study rebuts 75-year-old belief in reptile evolution

Challenging a 75-year-old notion about how and when reptiles evolved during the past 300 million-plus years involves a lot of camerawork, loads of CT scanning, and, most of all, thousands of miles of travel. Just check the ...

Biologists zero in on cells' environmental sensing mechanism

Evolutionary and developmental biologist Craig Albertson and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report that they have identified a molecular mechanism that allows an organism to change the way it looks ...

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