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Mating Contests Among Females, Long Ignored, May Shape Evolution
...to woo a reluctant female. Such competitions between males for the favor of choosy females are enshrined in evolutionary theory as “sexual selection,” with the females’ choices molding the evolution...
How Supergenes Fuel Evolution Despite Harmful Mutations
...closer the resemblance, the more potent the protection. What Bates and many later evolutionary biologists couldn’t explain was how this mimicry was possible. Getting the right shades of aquamarine and...
Genetic Engineering to Clash With Evolution
...said Kevin Esvelt, an evolutionary engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “On an evolutionary timescale, nothing we do matters. Except, of course, extinction. Evolution doesn’t come back from that...
Solution: ‘Darwinian Evolution Explains Lamarckism’
...that hark back to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution and its emphasis on the “inheritance of acquired characteristics.” Elementary textbooks often present Lamarck’s theory as a failed 19th-century rival to...
The Thorny Truth About Spine Evolution
...scientists who study ecological interactions between plants and animals. The overwhelming bulk of the scientific literature on the ecological and evolutionary purpose of thorniness (or, to use biologists’ preferred terminology,...
Why Evolution Reversed These Insects’ Sex Organs
...a general feature of energy expenditure and evolutionary diversification at work. “It really challenges our notions about sex,” said Justa Heinen-Kay, an evolutionary ecologist doing postdoctoral work at the University...
How to Triumph and Cooperate in Game Theory and Evolution
...the mom, evolution tries to optimize the fitness of the organism, which is analogous to maximizing the total amount of cake eaten by the twins. The new allele ratio will...
Evolution Saves Species From ‘Kill the Winner’ Disasters
Modelers find evidence that a combination of competition, predation and evolution will push ecosystems toward species diversity anywhere in the universe. At a meeting of the American Society of Naturalists...
How Virus-like ‘Jumping Genes’ Became Our Partners in Evolution
...with pale tree bark. But after the Industrial Revolution, when pollution from coal-powered factories darkened the trees, black wings came to dominate the population. Evolutionary biologists later explained that in...