The Galapagos Islands' giant tortoises are one of the world's best examples of evolution. Scientists are pioneering new conservation strategies to save them from extinction and restore their habitat.
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Articles on Evolutionary genetics
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Scientists have uncovered genes they believe have been passed down from an ancestor organism that all life evolved from.
There's long been a lack of evidence for why sex has become so much more common than asexual reproduction across nearly all species. Thankfully, this is now slowly changing.
Unlike other chromosomes, the X chromosome is inactivated in nearly all cells in women – and genes on it are active in very few tissues.
Genetic techniques are helping scientists work out how to stop invasive species before they rack up huge environmental and financial costs.
Reproduction for a female fig wasp can be a nightmarish process. When she is ready to lay her eggs, she leaves the fig in which she was born and became pregnant and searches for another. After she finds…
The time and date of the origin of insects and their pattern of evolution and survival over millions of years is revealed in a new study, published today in Science magazine. Insect relationships have…
A complete tree of life – showing how and when organisms are related to each other – has long been desired by biologists, but obscured by the vagaries of the fossil record. Now, next-generation gene sequencing…
The claim that homosexual men share a “gay gene” created a furore in the 1990s. But new research two decades on supports this claim – and adds another candidate gene. To an evolutionary geneticist, the…
Ratites – a group of flightless birds including the emu, ostrich and extinct moa – were long believed to have evolved from…
Human skin is a garden of microbes which is home to about 1,000 bacterial species. Most are benign but some invade the skin and cause illness – and of these, antibiotic resistant bacteria are particularly…
Bottlenose dolphins who use sponges as tools experience changes to their genetic make-up as a result, research shows. Researchers…
It’s not always easy to tell if a fish is male or female: they look more or less the same. But there are exceptions, such as guppies and, as with humans, guppy genitalia varies in size across the species…
A month ago, I returned to Australia from a trip to Burma. After four weeks in the country, I’d acclimatised to the culture, cuisine and people. My conditioning was so complete that on my return, I was…
Placental mammals like elephants, bats and humans evolved from small, insect-eating mammals, a study led by Stony Brook University…
In the late Devonian period, roughly 365 million years ago, fish-like creatures started venturing from shallow waters onto land. Among the various adaptations associated with the switch to land life was…
Academics at the University of Alaska have discovered evidence for genetic change in pink salmon populations as a response…
Using a process called paleo-experimental evolution, a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria has been resurrected and inserted…
Changes to just three genetic “letters” among billions is said to have contributed to the evolution and development of mammalian…
Despite three decades of research, an HIV vaccine remains elusive. The main reason for this is the virus’s uncanny ability to evolve resistance to immune control, so understanding how the virus adapts…
Top contributors
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Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at The Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath
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Postdoctoral Fellow in Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin
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Science Communicator, University of Sydney
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Senior Lecturer in Genetics, University of Adelaide
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Head, Metabolic Genetic Diseases Research Laboratory, Deakin University
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Associate Professor, Human Molecular Nutrition, University of Newcastle
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Jenny Graves is a Friend of The Conversation.
Distinguished Professor of Genetics, La Trobe University
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Senior Research Specialist, Johns Hopkins Medicine
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Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Western Australia
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Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Zoology, Queensland University of Technology
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Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto
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Senior Curator of Marine Invertebrates, Museums Victoria
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Director of the Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO
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Director of the Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology, Newcastle University
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PhD Student in Invasion Genomics, University of Southampton
