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Life’s Secrets Sought in a Snowflake
...evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Scientists are gaining insight into the process by re-creating the evolution of multicellularity in the lab. Using an approach known as...
Viruses Would Rather Jump to New Hosts Than Evolve With Them
The discovery that viruses move between species unexpectedly often is rewriting ideas about their evolutionary history — and may have troubling implications for the threat from emerging diseases. When new...
The Elusive Calculus of Insects’ Altruism and Kin Selection
...may help to change the math and shift the debate. In 1964, the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton seemingly explained one of the greatest paradoxes in biology with a simple...
‘Broadband’ Networks of Viruses May Help Bacteria Evolve Faster
...may accelerate bacterial evolution to a similar degree. Transduction may in fact be a central force in bacterial evolution. “We had assumed that transduction occurred at rates analogous to dial-up...
Why Do We Die Without Sleep?
...more about the evolutionary history of sleep. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta. Transcript Steven...
The Viral Paleontologist Who Unearths Pathogens’ Deep Histories
...Calvignac-Spencer’s experience working modern viruses convinced him of the need to reconstruct their evolutionary histories. He now leads the department of pathogen evolution at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health....
Complex Animals Led to More Oxygen, Says Maverick Theory
...Darwinian evolution needed time to arrive at that tipping point. “The gene regulatory network to build an animal is the most complex algorithm that evolution has ever produced,” he said....
What’s in a Name? Taxonomy Problems Vex Biologists
...Even if phyla were defined on the basis of evolutionary timing, deciding which point in the evolutionary process to use would still be arbitrary and anthropogenic. “If you want to...
Brain-Signal Proteins Evolved Before Animals Did
...language with which neurons speak to each other. But when evolutionary biologists tried to deduce which animal cells first started to use that language, the murkiness of early animal evolution...