337 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 reveals that a male-specific paralog of the Doublesex transcription factor, DsxM, drives the evolutionary origin of mayfly TurbEyes by expanding the embryonic ocular field to redeploy the conserved retinal determination gene network for the development of a novel male-specific visual system.
Flex-sweep 2.0 is a substantially updated, CNN-based method that significantly improves computational efficiency, flexibility, and scalability for detecting diverse selective sweeps from single-population genomic data while offering enhanced training capabilities and robust downstream analysis pipelines.
This paper introduces "Snarf," a hybrid method combining the phylogenetic network tool SnappNet with Approximate Bayesian Computation Random Forest to accurately infer complex evolutionary histories, which was applied to reveal that Asian rice domestication involved a single origin of Japonica followed by three key introgression events shaping Indica, cAus, and cBas varieties.
This study demonstrates that the meiosis-specific histone methyltransferase PRDM9 directly recognizes and binds to stable G-quadruplex DNA structures, revealing a novel mechanism by which these secondary structures facilitate PRDM9 recruitment and the initiation of meiotic recombination.
This paper presents a model demonstrating that while the Darwinian evolution of individual preferences can drive social groups toward more efficient collective strategies, the success and speed of this improvement critically depend on how individual preferences are aggregated into group decisions, which can otherwise lead to stagnation or maladaptive outcomes.
This study reveals that global variation in avian song complexity is primarily driven by the interaction of vocal learning, ecological factors like open habitats and migration, and evolutionary history, rather than by traditional explanations such as sexual selection or intelligence signaling.
This study utilizes whole-genome sequencing to reveal that the pantropical distribution of the moth genus *Parasa* (and its complex) was driven primarily by rapid long-distance dispersal from an African origin during the Miocene, rather than vicariance, while also demonstrating that the genus is non-monophyletic and requires significant taxonomic revision.
This study reveals that while thermal adaptation in the reef-building coral *Stylophora pistillata* relies on region-specific combinations of hundreds of genomic loci, broad genotype-environment models can predict these patterns and project that up to 30% of populations may face severe maladaptation by 2100 under high-emission climate scenarios.
By correcting empirical estimates of deleterious mutation rates to include slightly deleterious variants, this study demonstrates that rare and ultra-rare mutations drive substantial variance in human ancestral fitness, potentially explaining the "missing heritability" in complex diseases and highlighting the need to assess unique mutations rather than relying solely on polygenic risk scores.
This study integrates phylogenetics, species delimitation, and biogeographic modeling to reveal that the ancient centipede genus *Digitipes* originated in Gondwana around 126 million years ago, subsequently diversified through a combination of vicariance and dispersal events (including an Out-of-India migration to Southeast Asia), and harbors significantly higher cryptic diversity than previously recognized.