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A global analysis finds that tectonics, climate and mountains have jointly shaped the evolution of the world's terrestrial biodiversity into distinct biogeographical regions.
Physical complementarity among trees in the use of vertical space increases productivity due to species-specific differences and plasticity in crown architecture.
Cost–benefit analysis suggests that the costs of de-extinction could imperil conservation of extant biodiversity in many cases. But there is also an ethical dimension to this debate that cannot be ignored.
Recent developments in data acquisition and quantitative modelling allow evolutionary biologists to predict future processes. This Perspective reviews progress in understanding the evolutionary dynamics of systems such as microorganisms and cancer and discusses unifying concepts of predictive analysis.
miRNAs are crucial regulators of normal development in plants and animals, but their origins remain obscure. Exploration of the similarities and differences between different miRNA pathways help to elucidate their origins and role.
Humans have been modifying environments and habitats both indirectly and directly for millennia. This has resulted in extensive changes to the biology of non-domesticated non-human species, and this pattern is likely to increase in the future
We need to estimate protein tertiary structure, as well as using primary sequences, in order to further our understanding of protein evolution and evolutionary processes in general.
Female genital cutting in five West African nations is frequency-dependent and is associated with higher reproductive success among ethnicities in which cutting predominates, a fitness advantage that may outweigh its costs to physical and psychological health.
New palaeoecological data from New Guinea reveal that climatic change at the Holocene boundary is unlikely to have driven early agriculture in the region. More nuanced understanding of how humans responded to past climate change could better inform our responses in the future.
Artificial selection for antibiotic resistance in microorganisms reveals why and how expected evolutionary trade-offs between population growth rate and population carrying capacity are not observed in resource-limited environments, with ‘trade-ups’ occurring instead.
New microfossils suggest that a rich meiofauna was already present in the early Cambrian, offering a solution to the problem that the Cambrian explosion appears to have sprung out of nothing.
Current understanding of eco-evolutionary feedbacks rests primarily on simple systems at small spatial scales. Here, the authors outline a framework for examining spatiotemporal dynamics in species-rich networks at the metacommunity scale.
Speciation can be a sudden or gradual process, and may involve genomic tipping points where positive feedback accelerates the process towards completion. Here, the mechanics of speciation tipping points and their similarities to other dynamic systems are discussed.
Data from many genes across the genome are now being routinely used in the hope of reconstructing challenging parts of the tree of life, and a new method provides a practical way of resolving the phylogenetic trees suggested by different genes.
Bat species that echolocate using signals from their larynx, and those that do not, all share a similar pattern of inner ear development that is distinct from other mammals, implying a single evolutionary origin of laryngeal echolocation.
Plant–insect interactions reveal rapid recovery of terrestrial ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, at more than twice the rate of contemporaneous Northern Hemisphere ecosystems.
Analysis of environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from just 30 litres of seawater from the Arabian Gulf provides genetic insights into populations of the largest fish in the world.
