295 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.
Ancient DNA analysis of Song Dynasty melon seeds from China reveals that these fruits were introduced from the broader Asian domestication pool rather than independently domesticated locally, and were likely consumed as fresh or culinary fruits with green flesh and jade-green aesthetics rather than as sweet dessert melons.
This study reconstructs mobility patterns among Eneolithic-Bronze Age populations in the North Pontic steppe by establishing a regional strontium isotope baseline and analyzing human remains to identify individuals who migrated from the eastern or western Caspian steppes or experienced physiological stress.
This paper introduces Genomebook, a system that encodes LLM agent behaviors into a Mendelian genetic framework to demonstrate that structured, heritable parameterization enables predictable evolutionary adaptation and trait selection, unlike non-genetic baselines which converge to static population means.
This paper presents a Bayesian approach that links cross-inoculation assay data to Fisher's geometrical model to infer a multi-host fitness landscape for endive necrotic mosaic virus, revealing host permissiveness heterogeneity and phylogenetic concordance to better understand viral adaptation and establishment barriers.
This paper proposes a kinetic proofreading model demonstrating that environmental perturbations dynamically modulate genomic error correction to balance mutational supply and viability, thereby mechanistically explaining punctuated equilibrium and the constraints on evolutionary resilience dictated by the drift-barrier principle.
This study adapts the deep learning software phyddle to perform ancestral state reconstruction for discrete characters, demonstrating that while it matches Bayesian inference on simple models and small trees, it offers a viable alternative for complex models with intractable likelihoods, as validated by its application to empirical datasets including Liolaemus lizards and the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
This meta-analysis demonstrates that evolutionary parallelism in local adaptation between native and introduced plant ranges strengthens over time, driven primarily by the alignment of divergence directions as introduced populations transition from initial drift to selection-driven adaptation.
This study introduces a novel phylogenetic comparative method to analyze trait covariation in surgeonfishes, revealing that dietary ecotypes drive body and head shape evolution while locomotor tradeoffs create a significant negative correlation between caudal and pectoral fin shapes.
This paper introduces novel linear-time algorithms to overcome previous computational limitations, enabling the creation of a fully-dated, time-scaled phylogenetic tree of 2.3 million species to significantly expand the scope of evolutionary analyses.
TaxonMatch is a tool designed to integrate heterogeneous taxonomic data from diverse biological databases by resolving nomenclatural inconsistencies and synonymy, thereby enabling the construction of unified taxonomic backbones for applications such as linking molecular data to fossils and identifying endangered species.