We are all familiar with the Mafia. In China, it is the Triads, in Italy it is La Cosa Nostra. You pay for protection or disaster is sure to befall you. It happens in the bird world too, according to…

Without knowing it, organisms search for the next “winning” strategy in evolution. Mutation plays a key role in the evolution of new, and sometimes successful, traits. It's a lot like rock-paper-…

A new paper suggests that genes evolve more rapidly in species containing germ plasm, which challenges a long held belief about the way certain species of vertebrates evolved.  The…

Fruit flies are secretly harboring the biochemistry needed to glow in the dark —otherwise known as bioluminescence - according to a paper in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.…

Harvard evolutionary biologist Professor David Haig believes that infants that wake frequently at night to breastfeed are delaying the resumption of the mother's ovulation and therefore preventing…

In a new paper, researchers writing in Current Biology show how lactase persistence variants tell the story about the ancestry of the Khoe people in southern Africa and that their pastoralist…

Although Neanderthals are extinct but fragments of their genomes persist in modern humans.  These shared regions are unevenly distributed across the genome and some regions are particularly…

Why zebras have black and white stripes is a long-standind puzzle of evolution. To find out, the researchers behind a Nature Communications paper mapped the geographic distributions of the seven…

Genghis Khan is famous in evolution because a giant chunk of the world carries is DNA. A recent story of brown bears shows that males roam much greater distances than females, and mating is part of…

If you become saucer-eyed when afraid or you squint from disgust, it may not be cultural - it may be biology. Near-opposite facial expressions like squinting and being wide-eyes are rooted in…