evolutionary biology – Quanta Magazine

The Viral Paleontologist Who Unearths Pathogens’ Deep Histories

Marta Zaraska — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 13:06:13 +0000

Like many children of his generation, raised on a steady diet of Jurassic Park and its sequels, Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer wanted to be a paleontologist when he grew up. Unlike most, he came close. Rather than digging for fossilized bones in the dirt, however, he paws through objects in natural history museums and medical collections for old biological specimens from which he can extract the...

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The Mystery of the Missing Multicellular Prokaryotes

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 02 May 2024 14:23:48 +0000

Every organism visible to the naked eye is a mass of genetically identical cells. Each of these multicellular creatures started as a single cell that divided countless times to produce its body. And while each cell contains the same genome, they express their DNA in a variety of ways, giving rise to specialized cells and tissues that perform different roles, such as skin, liver or immune cells.

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Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 14:55:46 +0000

Ever since viruses came to light in the late 1800s, scientists have set them apart from the rest of life. Viruses were far smaller than cells, and inside their protein shells they carried little more than genes. They could not grow, copy their own genes or do much of anything. Researchers assumed that each virus was a solitary particle drifting alone through the world, able to replicate only if it...

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Mollusk Eyes Reveal How Future Evolution Depends on the Past

Viviane Callier — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 19:00:00 +0000

Biologists have often wondered what would happen if they could rewind the tape of life’s history and let evolution play out all over again. Would lineages of organisms evolve in radically different ways if given that opportunity? Or would they tend to evolve the same kinds of eyes, wings and other adaptive traits because their previous evolutionary histories had already sent them down certain...

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Evolution: Fast or Slow? Lizards Help Resolve a Paradox.

Carrie Arnold — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 15:30:50 +0000

James Stroud had a problem. The evolutionary biologist had spent several years studying lizards on a small island in Miami. These Anolis lizards had looked the same for millennia; they had apparently evolved very little in all that time. Logic told Stroud that if evolution had favored the same traits over millions of years, then he should expect to see little to no change over a single generation.

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