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 ...

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 ...

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

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, ...

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 ...

A new method for quantifying plant evolution reveals that after the onset of early seed plants, complexity halted for 250 million years until the diversification of flowering plants about 100 million ...

The evolution of brain processing capacity has traditionally been inferred from data on brain size. However, similarly sized brains of distantly related species can differ in the number and ...

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, ...