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How Viruses May Have Led to Complex Life
...idea that viruses played a role in one of the most significant complexity jumps in evolution: The transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Prokaryotic organisms, which include bacteria and archaea, were...
Where Do New Genes Come From?
In their search for sources of genetic novelty, researchers find that some “orphan genes” with no obvious ancestors evolve out of junk DNA, contrary to old assumptions. The evolution of...
How Do New Organs Evolve? A Beetle Gland Shows the Way.
...another, locked in a cycle of mutual dependence. The coevolution that the researchers observed in the beetle gland could be “a kind of paradigm for functional evolution of organs in...
Multiverse Collisions May Dot the Sky
...“But I think that’s the wrong way to think about it.” The theory of evolution, Peiris argues, also resembles a tautology in certain respects — “an organism exists because it...
The Shape-Shifting Army Inside Your Cells
...a protein has both disordered and ordered regions, how do the two interact? How did the evolution of disordered proteins differ from that of folded ones? Also, how do molecules...
Bacterial Complexity Revises Ideas About ‘Which Came First?’
...discovered. Scientists are now starting to explore what that means in the context of eukaryotic evolution. They hope either to establish direct evolutionary relationships among the growing list of structures,...
Why Extraterrestrial Life May Not Seem Entirely Alien
...of evolution,” said Kershenbaum, a lecturer and director of studies in the natural sciences at the university’s Girton College. He argues that evolution is a universal law of nature, like...
How Life and Luck Changed Earth’s Minerals
Is evolution predictable, or was it heavily shaped by random events? Biologists have argued over this question for decades. Some have suggested that if we replayed the history of life...
A Timely Fix for a Grand Theory of Nature
...up and spinning out to affect the evolution of the ecosystem. In the new study, the team focuses on two forests, one in Panama and one in Malaysia. Using census...