A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.

Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, have systematically analysed the time of emergence for a large number of genes - genes which can also initiate diseases.

New research has provided the first detailed look at the internal head skeleton of Tiktaalik roseae, the 375-million-year-old fossil animal that represents an important intermediate step in the evolutionary transition from fish to animals that walked on land.

A Florida State University researcher who uses high-powered computers to map the workings of proteins has uncovered a mechanism that gives scientists a better understanding of how evolution occurs at the molecular level.

Hidden away in museums for more that 100 years, some recently rediscovered flatfish fossils have filled a puzzling gap in the story of evolution and answered a question that initially stumped even Charles Darwin.

What makes a human different from a chimp? Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] have come one important step closer to answering such evolutionary questions correctly.

Undoubted primates first appear almost synchronously in the fossil records of Asia, Europe, and North America.

The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT.

Crayfish body fossils and burrows discovered in Victoria, Australia, have provided the first physical evidence that crayfish existed on the continent as far back as the Mesozoic Era, says Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin, who headed up a study on the finds.

Genes have the ability to recognise similarities in each other from a distance, without any proteins or other biological molecules aiding the process, according to new research published this week in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

A coalition of 17 organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Science Teachers Association, is calling on the scientific community to become more involved in the promotion of science education, including evolution.

Most modern-day groups of beetles have been around since the time of the dinosaurs and have been diversifying ever since, says new research out in Science today (Friday 21 December 2007).