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A New Idea for How to Assemble Life
...not their components.” To understand how assembly processes operate within these notional universes, consider the problem of Darwinian evolution. Conventionally, evolution is something that “just happened” once replicating molecules arose...
A Zombie Gene Protects Elephants From Cancer
...the growth of embryonic stem cells. Lynch presented his work at the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology meeting in Calgary in August 2017, and it is currently posted on...
Why Earth’s Cracked Crust May Be Essential for Life
...and a landmass — all of which exchange and circulate material — as a prerequisite for life. Yet understanding how plate tectonics affects evolution — and whether it is a...
How Insulin Helped Create Ant Societies
...suggests that there’s something very general about how evolution proceeds when it increases the complexity of a system,” Kronauer said. To Suarez, it means that this kind of evolutionary innovation...
A Lack of COVID-19 Genomes Could Prolong the Pandemic
...laboratory work, but that isn’t the same as the virus’s rate of evolution, which depends on how quickly and successfully a mutation spreads throughout a population. The evolutionary rate is...
A Billion Years Before Sex, Ancient Cells Were Equipped for It
...which could snuff out their lineage. Why this hazardous arrangement caught on in evolution has been the subject of intense study; it’s generally presumed that sexual recombination helps to keep...
Ancient Genes for Symbiosis Hint at Mitochondria’s Origins
...mitochondria, setting the stage for the revolution to come. Lionel Guy, an evolutionary microbiologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and an author of the new paper, began sequencing bacteria of...
Why Is It So Hard to Define a Species?
...Yeah, well, Darwin was actually a very important figure in the development of a modern species concept because he proposed evolution, and specifically evolution by natural selection. He kind of...
Shrinking Bat DNA and Elastic Genomes
...an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in England. Her reaction mimicked the befuddlement of countless anthropocentric minds who have puzzled over this discrepancy since scientists began comparing...