A new study at the University of Chicago has shown that elaborate protein structures accumulate over deep time even when they serve no purpose, because a universal biochemical property and the genetic ...

Digital evolution employs self-replicating computer programmes that undergo mutation and selection in virtual environments, providing an experimentally tractable system for probing fundamental ...

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like ...

Researchers from the Charles University in Prague reconstructed the evolution of brain neuron numbers in amniotes and revealed that mammals and birds have dramatically increased neuron numbers in ...

Simple systems can reproduce faster than complex ones. So, how can the complexity of life have arisen from simple chemical beginnings? Starting with a simple system of self-replicating fibres, ...

Depending upon how you do the counting, there are around 9 million species on Earth, from the simplest single-celled organisms to humans. It’s reassuring to imagine that complex bodies and brains like ...

At the center of this shift is a paradox: the same mutation can be both a liability and an asset, depending on how it interacts with its genetic neighbors and the structure of the population that ...

Simple systems can reproduce faster than complex ones. So, how can the complexity of life have arisen from simple chemical beginnings? Starting with a simple system of self-replicating fibers, ...