Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Evolutionary biology is a subdiscipline of the biological sciences concerned with the origin of life and the diversification and adaptation of life forms over time.
Ancient proteins carry genetic information from fossils that are too old or degraded for ancient DNA recovery. This protocol describes the extraction and tandem mass spectrometry sequencing of million-year-old dental enamel proteins for phylogenetic inference.
Prior work has identified a male-only effective population size bottleneck 3-5000 years ago. While violent competition has been proposed as a cause, the authors here show that a segmentary patrilineal system with lineal fission provides a peaceful alternative explanation.
Logsdon et al. report the second complete sequence of all centromeres from a single human genome, enabling comparative analyses of the variation in tandemly repeating α-satellite DNA.
In this Journal Club article, Jenny Tung reflects on a 1975 paper from King and Wilson that emphasized the importance of gene regulatory changes in human evolution.
An analysis of publicly available viral genomes explores the evolutionary dynamics of host jumps and shows that humans are as much a source of viral spillover events to other animals as they are recipients.
In this Journal Club, Yoav Ram recalls how he reconciled results from his own research with the reduction principle through the help of a paper published in PNAS by Altenberg et al.
Using over 200 chromosomal genomes to reconstruct 250 million years of evolutionary history, we define the 32 linkage groups (Merian elements) that were present in the ancestor of Lepidoptera. We chart the dynamics of chromosome fusion and fission that accompanied the global diversification of Lepidoptera.