Paleobiologist Geerat Vermeij is enthralled with mollusks. Their shells line the surfaces and fill the cabinets and drawers ...

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to ...

Biologists are closing in on a puzzle that seems to turn classic evolutionary logic inside out, yet may be so common that it deserves to be called a new rule of life. Instead of always purging harmful ...

An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in ...

Humans don’t have a defined mating season like deer or wolves. Here’s how evolution blended biology, culture and social life ...

The evolution of eukaryotic cells represents one of the most pivotal transitions in the history of life, marked by the emergence of cellular compartmentalisation and increased complexity. Central to ...

Evolution is a complicated thing. Much of modern evolutionary biology seeks to reconcile the seeming randomness of the forces behind the process — how mutations occur, for example — with the ...

Why does natural selection appear to happen slowly on long timescales and quickly on short ones? A multigenerational study of four lizard species addresses biology’s “paradox of stasis.” James Stroud ...

It may have fewer than many of the other sciences, but biology does have two dozen or so “rules”—broad generalizations about the behavior or nature and evolution. Now, USC researchers want to add a ...

A new platform combines rational protein design with continuous evolution to discover functional molecules more efficiently. In medicine and biotechnology, the ability to evolve proteins with new or ...

Assembly theory bridges the gap between physics and biology in explaining how complex objects are identifiable as products of evolution and how reusability of parts allows novelty and identical ...