Over the past 10,000 years, evolution in West Eurasia has selected for light skin, red hair and resistance to HIV in humans, ...

Genes make us who we are—but are they shaped by chance, natural selection, or something else?

"Survival of the fittest" is the catch phrase of evolution by natural selection. While natural selection favors the most fit organisms around, evolutionary biologists have long wondered whether this ...

NASA had a big—and little—problem. For a small satellite, the agency needed a tiny antenna, with very specific communication ...

When most people think about natural selection, they imagine individuals competing with one another: The fastest animal escapes predators, the strongest plant produces more seeds, and the most ...

Q: Tell us about this "dangerous idea" of Darwin's. A: I think Darwin's idea of natural selection is the best idea anybody ever had, ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein. What it does is it promises to ...

In natural populations, the mechanisms of evolution do not act in isolation. This is crucially important to conservation geneticists, who grapple with the implications of these evolutionary processes ...

A team of global experts has discovered new signals of natural selection in humans. Led by UC Santa Barbara Tsimane Health and Life History Project co-director Michael Gurven, the team studied two ...

It turns out where certain desert shrubs grow matters a lot — especially when it comes to making sure they don’t all end up looking the same. FIU assistant professor in the Institute of Environment ...

The common view of natural selection is based solely on the individual: A trait allows an organism to out-compete its rivals and is thus passed down to its offspring. To suggest otherwise can provoke ...