Evolutionary biology

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish.

All modern multicellular life — all life that any of us regularly see — is made of cells with a knack for compartmentalization. Recent discoveries are revealing how the first eukaryote got its start.

The idea of a species is fundamental to the way that many people understand the structure of life on Earth. But ask 10 specialists how they define the concept and you might get 10 answers. In this episode, co-host Janna Levin speaks with evolutionary biologist Kevin de Queiroz about what makes defining and delineating species such a slippery process, and why it matters to our understanding of both evolution and conservation.

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer searches museum jars for genetic traces of flu, measles and other viruses. Their evolutionary stories can help treat modern outbreaks and prepare for future ones.

Why have bacteria never evolved complex multicellularity? A new hypothesis suggests that it could come down to how prokaryotic genomes respond to a small population size.

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community.

The visual systems of an obscure group of mollusks provide a rare natural example of path-dependent evolution, in which a critical fork in the creatures’ past determined their evolutionary futures.

Why does natural selection appear to happen slowly on long timescales and quickly on short ones? A multigenerational study of four lizard species addresses biology’s “paradox of stasis.”