New research challenges long-standing assumptions about human evolution, revealing that natural selection has been more ...

DNA switches that predate humans and Neanderthals still influence how people speak today, offering new clues about language ...

What happens when natural selection, the most powerful process driving change in the living world, shapes artificial ...

The whole world could soon be seeing red. Instead of being the punchline, redheads will have the last laugh, as a new study ...

When Charles Darwin first proposed how evolution works in 1859, it seemed plausible. Tiny changes stack up over time, eventually leading a species to become something entirely different. Aside from ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising new picture of human origins that challenges the long-held idea of a single ancestral ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

The idea that modern humans inherited DNA from Neanderthal ancestors is one of the 21st century’s most celebrated discoveries in evolution. It may not be that simple.

A system once tied to DNA organization in cyanobacteria has evolved into a structure that shapes the cell itself. This shift ...

A series of recent studies using unprecedented ancient DNA datasets have revealed that human evolution is far more complex and recent than previously thought. Findings challenge the idea of a single ...

A landmark Harvard-led study analyzing nearly 16,000 ancient genomes from West Eurasia reveals that natural selection has ...

The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of biology. They carry genetic material, but they cannot make proteins on ...