Why are some species of plants and animals favored by natural selection? And why does natural selection not favor other species similarly?

Shedding some genetically induced excess baggage may have helped a tiny fish thrive in freshwater and outsize its marine ancestors, according to a UBC study published today in Science Express.

"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 leads to the best possible organisms in the long run.

Scientists at MIT have come up with a mathematical approach for analyzing a protein simultaneously in a set of ecologically distinct species to identify occurrences of natural selection in an organism’s evolution.

Many gamblers claim to have a "system", whether they're shooting craps, backing horses, or punting on the stock market. Now, researchers in Taiwan have devised an approach to spotting when a company is likely to fail based on the principles of natural selection. They report details of their system in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Electronic Finance.

Long-lived, wild animals harbor genetic differences that influence how quickly they begin to show their age, according to the results of a long-term study reported online on December 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

In a molecular tour de force, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have provided an exquisitely detailed picture of natural selection as it occurs at the genetic level.

If there were an evolutionary arms race between a small, hot animal and a cold, big animal, it’s going to be awfully hard for the cold, big animal to keep up.

Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage - so experts believe. But what preceded these pre-life steps?

Scientists from the universities of Exeter and Cambridge have turned a textbook example of sexual selection on its head and shown that females may be more astute at choosing a mate than previously thought.

Scientists at MIT have created an ocean model so realistic that the virtual forests of diverse microscopic plants they "sowed" have grown in population patterns that precisely mimic their real-world counterparts.

A group of organisms that has never had sex in over 40 million years of existence has nevertheless managed to evolve into distinct species, says new research published today. The study challenges the assumption that sex is necessary for organisms to diversify and provides scientists with new insight into why species evolve in the first place.