Latest Evolutionary biology Stories

Tim Cooper provides better understanding of environmental 'fitness' in Science magazine studyWorking to better predict general patterns of evolution, a University of Houston (UH) biologist and his team have discovered some surprising things about gene mutations that might one day make it possible to predict the progression of chronic disease.UH evolutionary biologist Timothy Cooper and his colleagues describe their findings in a paper titled "Negative Epistasis Between Beneficial...

For more than 40 years, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has published the Red List of Threatened Species describing the conservation status of various species of animals. They are now also including plants in their lists and the picture they present is dramatic. According to recent estimates, around 20 per cent of flowering plants are currently at risk of extinction "“ though the exact number is unknown since such a small proportion of plant species has even been...

A projected wave of extinctions of plant and animal species this century may have been overestimated because the most widely used scientific method can exaggerate losses by more than 160 percent, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.The scientists said that habitat destruction by humans is driving animal and plant species toward extinction at just half the pace as previously believed.They attribute the overestimation to flaws in the most popular scientific method,...

However, researchers say, global extinction crisis remains very seriousThe most widely used methods for calculating species extinction rates are "fundamentally flawed" and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent, life scientists report May 19 in the journal Nature.However, while the problem of species extinction caused by habitat loss is not as dire as many conservationists and scientists had believed, the global extinction crisis is real, says Stephen Hubbell, a...

Aggressive male mating behavior might well be a successful reproductive strategy for the individual but it can drive the species to extinction, an international research team headed by evolutionary biologist Daniel Rankin from the University of Zurich has demonstrated in a mathematical model. Evolutionary biologists have long debated whether the behavior of the individual is able to influence processes on a population or species level. The possibility of selection at species level is still...

Around one in 20 men is infertile, but despite the best efforts of scientists, in many cases the underlying causes of infertility have remained a mystery. New findings by a team of Australian and Swedish researchers, however, will go a long way towards explaining this mystery.According to their research published in Science today, a small set of genes located within the power-plants of our cells "“ the mitochondria "“ are crucial to unravelling the secrets of male infertility.Most of our...

Ever since Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have wondered whether evolutionary adaptations can be reversed.Answering that question has proved difficult, partly due to conflicting evidence. In 2003, scientists showed that some species of insects have gained, lost and regained wings over millions of years. But a few years later, a different team found that a protein that helps control cells' stress responses could not evolve back to its original form.Jeff...

Until now, the scientific community had assumed that wild animals died before they got old. Now, a Spanish-Mexican research team has for the first time demonstrated ageing in a population of wild birds (Sula nebouxii) in terms of their ability to live and reproduce."It was always thought that senescence was something particular to humans and domestic animals, because we have an extended life expectancy", Alberto Velando, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Ecology and...

It's not quite Christmas, but the DNA sequence of a small plant that resembles the seasonal conifers is providing biofuels researchers with information that could influence the development of candidate biofuel feedstock plants and offering botanists long-awaited insights into plant evolution."When you burn coal, you're burning Selaginella's ancestors," said Purdue University botanist Jody Banks, who originally proposed that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI)...

The end-Permian extinction, by far the most dramatic biological crisis to affect life on Earth, may not have been as catastrophic for some creatures as previously thought, according to a new study led by the University of Bristol.An international team of researchers studied the parareptiles, a diverse group of bizarre-looking terrestrial vertebrates which varied in shape and size.  Some were small, slender, agile and lizard-like creatures, while others attained the size of rhinos; many had...