Human newborns arrive remarkably underdeveloped. The reason lies in a deep evolutionary trade-off between big brains, bipedalism and the limits of motherhood.

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

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 ...

Scientists call this speck LUCA — the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Since the concept of LUCA first emerged, it has ...

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

Ancient duplicated genes are giving scientists their first real clues about what life was like before all life on Earth ...

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a modular, open-source robot that can ...

A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have dismissed them as misguided careerists – and the conflict may determine the future of ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...