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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...
All Life on Earth Today Descended From a Single Cell. Meet LUCA.
...resembling modern microbes remarkably quickly, he said. “That’s really exciting.” “Our work suggests that those early steps of evolution weren’t hard; they’re pretty easy,” said co-author Phil Donoghue, an evolutionary...
Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals
...that support vertebrate intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals. It’s hard to track down which path evolution took, given that any trace of the ancient ancestor’s actual brain vanished...
Why Am I Left-Handed?
...Why are 90% of people right-handed? An astronomical amount of research has gone into trying to find out. Geneticists, developmental biologists, behavioral and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists all...
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...
Simple Bacteria Offer Clues to the Origins of Photosynthesis
...State University have extrapolated what the earliest version of photosynthesis might have looked like nearly 3.5 billion years ago. If they are right, their findings could rewrite the evolutionary history...
Icefish Study Adds Another Color to the Story of Blood
The rainbow of pigments that animals use for blood illustrates a central truth about evolution. In February, a genomics study appearing in Nature Ecology & Evolution drew attention to the...