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Evolving Bacteria Can Evade Barriers to ‘Peak’ Fitness
...a way. Nearly a century ago, the evolutionary theorist Sewall Wright imagined a landscape of mountains and valleys. The peaks represented states of high evolutionary fitness for organisms, while the...
The Year in Biology
...prevailing wisdom and reveal a stronger, better intellectual framework. Both kinds of revolution unleash avalanches of new ideas and insights that improve our understanding of how life works. This past...
Cellular Self-Destruction May Be Ancient. But Why?
...membrane are all that remains. “It’s really amazing how fast, how organized it is,” said Aurora Nedelcu, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Brunswick who has studied the...
Meet the Eukaryote, the First Cell to Get Organized
...lineages that lack mitochondria used to have them and then lost them sometime in evolutionary history.) And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured additional organelles that...
A Map of Human History, Hidden in DNA
...His early exposure to human differences — “I loved geography, I loved languages, I loved history” — morphed into a deep curiosity about evolution and genetic diversity. His work reflects...
Beating the Odds for Lucky Mutations
...resistance to UV or antibiotics. The question that has tormented some evolutionary biologists ever since is whether nature favored this arrangement. Is the upsurge in mutations merely a secondary consequence...
DNA Analysis Reveals a Genus of Plants Hiding in Plain Sight
...of the original naturalists. The rising importance of the theory of evolution to biology altered the purpose of taxonomy. Taxonomy began simply as a way of naming and cataloging organisms...
World’s Simplest Animal Reveals Hidden Diversity
...thing because it has no real defined body,” said Michael Eitel, an evolutionary biologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany. “There’s no mouth, there’s no back, no nerve cells,...
A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics
...Bourjaily said. It “really started this revolution.” In the mid-2000s, more patterns emerged in the scattering amplitudes of particle interactions, repeatedly hinting at an underlying, coherent mathematical structure behind quantum...