A major evolutionary theory says most genetic changes don’t really matter, but new evidence suggests that’s not true. Researchers found that helpful mutations happen surprisingly often. The twist is ...

For more than half a century, many biologists have leaned on the neutral theory of molecular evolution to explain how DNA and proteins change over time. The idea grew from early work in the 1960s, ...

“One of the reasons for the popularity of the neutral theory was that it made things a lot easier,” said Andrew Kern, a population geneticist now at the University of Oregon, who contributed an ...

Biologists are closing in on a puzzle that seems to turn classic evolutionary logic inside out, yet may be so common that it ...

While evolution involves changes in organisms that we can observe, they undergo evolution at a deeper level, too. That is, changes affect the "letters" (four different types of chemical units) in the ...

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