Group Selection Was Debated For Decades. A New Review Says The Empirical Case Is Far Stronger Than Critics Claimed. In A Nutshell A new review of nearly 3,000 scientific papers found 280 studies ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

Evolutionary biology explores how living systems change over time through variation, inheritance and differential success. At its heart lies the concept of descent with modification: populations ...

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection transformed biology and continues to guide modern science, from ...

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as “primitive” or “ancient” and ...

The study of early vertebrates provides an essential window into the evolutionary processes that shaped modern biodiversity. Fossil discoveries spanning the Silurian to Devonian periods reveal a ...

In this computer simulation of a self-replicating structure, the pink square represents the signal to degrade the connection between the "parent" structure (left) and its "offspring" (right). This ...

Scientists have developed a theoretical model that uncovers the dual role of polyploidy -- organisms carrying extra genome copies -- in evolution. Their findings reveal that polyploidy can stabilize ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Andréa Morris reports on emergent intelligence in diverse systems. “Where are all the genetic cures?” asks Denis Noble, a ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, reports that Italian bears living in areas with many villages evolved and became smaller and less aggressive. Humans have long shaped the environments in ...