Discover interesting facts about how evolution works, the different patterns that can emerge from evolution, how quickly organisms can evolve, and whether evolution is a random or ordered process When ...

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

A new study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (MPI-EB) sheds fresh light on one of the most debated concepts in biology: evolvability. The work provides the first ...

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.” James Stroud ...

The movement of genetic material between organisms that aren’t directly related is a significant driver of evolution, especially among single-celled organisms like bacteria and archaea. A team led by ...