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 ...

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 ...

The emergence and maintenance of cooperation by natural selection is an enduring conundrum in evolutionary biology, which has been studied using a variety of game theoretical models inspired by different biological situations. ...

Life is based on replication and evolution. But replication cannot be taken for granted. We must ask what there was prior to replication and evolution. How does evolution begin? We have proposed prelife as a generative ...

We study the origin of evolution. Evolution is based on replication, mutation, and selection. But how does evolution begin? When do chemical kinetics turn into evolutionary dynamics? We propose “prelife” and “prevolution” ...

The standard model for direct reciprocity is the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, where in each round players choose between cooperation and defection. Here we extend the standard framework to include costly punishment. Now ...

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 ...

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of ...

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 ...

<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 ...