Recent research suggests that some human-like social skills evolved in dogs (Canis familiaris) during domestication as an incidental by-product of selection for “tame” forms of behavior. It is still possible, however, that ...

The spread of high-level pyrimethamine resistance in Africa threatens to curtail the therapeutic lifetime of antifolate antimalarials. We studied the possible evolutionary pathways in the evolution of pyrimethamine resistance ...

Understanding the genetic basis of evolutionary adaptation is limited by our ability to efficiently identify the genomic locations of adaptive mutations. Here we describe a method that can quickly and precisely map the ...

The C-C chemokine receptor 5, 32 base-pair deletion (CCR5-Δ32) allele confers strong resistance to infection by the AIDS virus HIV. Previous studies have suggested that CCR5-Δ32 arose within the past 1,000 y and rose to ...

Natural selection optimizes an organism's genotype within the context of its environment. Adaptations to one environment can decrease fitness in another, revealing evolutionary trade-offs. Here, we show that the cost of ...

The geological record of protists begins well before the Ediacaran and Cambrian diversification of animals, but the antiquity of that history, its reliability as a chronicle of evolution and the causal inferences that can ...

<i>Burkholderia xenovorans</i> LB400 (LB400), a well studied, effective polychlorinated biphenyl-degrader, has one of the two largest known bacterial genomes and is the first nonpathogenic <i>Burkholderia</i> isolate ...

Using molecular sequence data, biologists can generate hypotheses of protistan phylogeny and divergence times. Fossils, however, provide our only direct constraints on the timing and environmental context of early eukaryotic ...

It is generally assumed that stabilizing selection promoting a phenotypic optimum acts to shape variation in quantitative traits across individuals and species. Although gene expression represents an intensively studied ...

Evolutionary biology is a historical science, like astronomy and geology. Understanding how and why evolution has occurred requires synthesizing multiple lines of inquiry. Historical studies, such as those that estimate ...