For more than a century, the human appendix has been written off as a biological relic, a shrunken leftover from plant-eating ancestors that serves no real purpose. That view is now outdated. A ...

Most people know only two things about the appendix: You don’t need it – and if it bursts, you need surgery fast. That basic ...

A long-disputed rule in biology says bigger is better, but a new computer model illuminates why that’s not necessarily true. By Lauren Leffer Published Jan 18, 2024 11:45 AM EST Get the Popular ...

A new study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (MPI-EB) sheds fresh light on one of the most debated concepts in biology: evolvability. The work provides the first ...

An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in ...

In Lake Malawi, hundreds of species of cichlid fish have evolved with astonishing speed, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study how biodiversity arises.

Human evolution is often told as a tidy story of adaptation, yet some of our most familiar body parts still defy straightforward explanation. From the jut of the human chin to the curve of the outer ...

Wild scarlet monkeyflowers in California survived a historic drought by relying on a rapid evolution, marking the first time the process has been observed in the wild.

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Selection in Assembly Space. (A) Pictorial representation of the assembly space represents the formation of combinatorial object space from building blocks and physical constraints. (B) Observed copy ...

Assembly theory bridges the gap between physics and biology in explaining how complex objects are identifiable as products of evolution and how reusability of parts allows novelty and identical ...