In Lake Malawi, hundreds of species of cichlid fish have evolved with astonishing speed, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study how biodiversity arises.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution generated scientific debate and discussion not only in Darwin's own time, but for decades afterward. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the until the ...

Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on human genetics and evolution. Katrina Huynh UC Davis A professor ...

Unlike the nuclear genome, the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) is small, circular, and maternally inherited. This simplifies lineage tracing and can guide inferences of evolutionary relationships as part ...

This volume is based on the National Academy of Sciences' Colloquium on the Tempo and Mode of Evolution. The articles appearing in these pages were contributed by speakers at the colloquium and have ...

To Shakespeare’s Hamlet we humans are “the paragon of animals”. But recent advances in genetics are suggesting that humans are far from being evolution’s greatest achievement. For example, humans have ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ancestor" (LUCA) represents the most ancient organism that researchers can ...

Tempo, mode, the progenote, and the universal root / W. Ford Doolittle and James R. Brown -- Phylogeny from function : the origin of tRNA is in replication, not translation / Nancy Maizels and Alan M.

A groundbreaking DNA study has unveiled a hidden chapter in human evolution, revealing that all modern humans evolved from two ancient and distinct groups. This research, published in March 2025, ...

In five cases where vertebrates evolved monogamy, the same changes in gene expression occurred each time. In many non-monogamous species, females provide all or most of the offspring care. In ...

When a cell divides, the genome has to be duplicated, then the two copies separate, with one going to each daughter cell. But there have been whole genome duplication events in organisms in which both ...