389 papers
Evolutionary biology explores the dynamic history of life on Earth, tracing how species change, adapt, and diversify over time. This field investigates the mechanisms driving everything from the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria to the complex social behaviors of primates, revealing the deep connections that bind all living organisms together.
On Gist.Science, we ensure these groundbreaking discoveries remain accessible by processing every new preprint uploaded to bioRxiv in this category. Our team generates both plain-language overviews and detailed technical summaries for each paper, bridging the gap between raw research and public understanding without requiring a specialized background.
Below are the latest studies in evolutionary biology, offering fresh insights into the ongoing story of life.
This study demonstrates that sublethal immune resistance, which impairs parasite growth and virulence without eliminating infection, creates reaction-norm patterns that are mathematically indistinguishable from true tolerance, thereby challenging the validity of using fitness-parasite burden slopes to differentiate between these two host defense strategies.
By analyzing the distribution and regulation of transposable elements across 78 teleost fish species, this study provides an evolutionary genomics framework that confirms the host-transposon relationship as a coevolutionary arms race driven by Red Queen dynamics.
This study utilizes whole genome sequencing to reveal that the invasive avian vampire fly (*Philornis downsi*) colonized the Galapagos Islands via a bottlenecked introduction to San Cristobal, followed by asymmetric, wind- and shipping-mediated dispersal westward to other islands, creating distinct genetic structures that inform targeted control strategies to protect endemic birds.
Using an enhanced version of the Aevol simulator that incorporates realistic genome structures and mutation-rate modifier genes, this study demonstrates that while natural selection systematically drives the evolution of higher replication fidelity, the ultimate mutation rate is constrained by the interplay of genetic drift and the limited supply of beneficial fidelity-improving mutations.
By training machine learning models on bacterial gene content with noise augmentation to improve generalization across evolutionary distances, researchers successfully predicted ancestral phenotypes and concluded that the last bacterial common ancestor was likely an anaerobic, double-membraned, moderately thermophilic organism.
This paper demonstrates through simulations and weighted mean squared error comparisons that weighted least squares (WLS) is a superior and more flexible method than the general random walk (GRW) model for analyzing sparse fossil data with realistic measurement errors, as GRW struggles to estimate parameters accurately and may yield overly optimistic AIC results under such conditions.
This paper proposes a theory explaining why observed group sizes often deviate from optimal levels by demonstrating how the interplay between insider-outsider admission conflicts and internal crowding tensions, mediated through strategies of exclusion, fission, and admission, drives populations into either stable optimal regimes or bimodal distributions of supra- and sub-optimal sizes.
This study identifies Cupidon, an adhesion GPCR in the choanoflagellate *Salpingoeca rosetta*, as a dual-function regulator that suppresses cell aggregation under nutrient-rich conditions but promotes gamete fusion during starvation-induced mating, thereby demonstrating that aGPCR-mediated control of cell adhesion predates the origin of metazoans.
This paper introduces a versioned, continuously updated atlas and accompanying R package that systematically maps the empirical resolution and archival uncertainty of species-level phylogenies across the tree of life, enabling researchers to transparently incorporate provenance and inclusion-criterion variability into comparative analyses rather than treating phylogenies as fixed inputs.
This study leverages haplotype-resolved genome assemblies from over 600 vertebrate species to comprehensively map 35.3 million structural variants across 500 million years of evolution, revealing distinct clade-specific patterns in abundance and mechanisms driven by transposable elements and DNA structures, while demonstrating that structural variants have a disproportionately large impact on functional genetic variation compared to single nucleotide variants.