Every time we speak, we're improvising. "Humans possess a remarkable ability to talk about almost anything, sometimes putting ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

In 1943, a physicist and a biologist published a paper that confirmed one of the central pillars of Darwin's theory of evolution. The paper, by Max Delbrück of Vanderbilt University and Salvador Luria ...

Emerging research reveals that organisms may never fully catch up to their changing environments, opening new questions about how evolution really unfolds. Credit: Stock New research challenges the ...

For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ordinary ...

The theory of evolution by natural selection was first formulated in Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. It describes how organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift — driven not by genes, but by culture. In a paper published in the Oxford ...

Francis Thackeray has received funding from the National Research Foundation. Global cooling that happened millions of years ago was thought to be the result of ocean currents. He suggests instead it ...

Assembly Theory is a way to understand how the complexity of life emerged through a mechanism of “self-assembly.” It could explain how life formed on Earth—or other planets—via the shortest path to ...

A fossil dug up during the Civil War has spent more than a century mislabeled. Once thought to be a seaworm, it turns out the creature is something entirely different – and far more important. It’s ...