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 observed inter-population differences in GC content at polymorphic sites are primarily driven by the interaction between demographic history, mutation biases, and GC-biased gene conversion rather than stable evolutionary shifts, as these patterns largely disappear when rare variants are included in the analysis.
This study reveals that the diversification of Asian *Passiflora* in Xishuangbanna, China, is driven by a complex interplay of reticulate evolution, incomplete lineage sorting, and extensive plastome restructuring, resulting in distinct population structures and recent demographic declines that underscore the urgent conservation needs of these localized taxa.
This study establishes a mathematical mapping between evolutionary scenarios and governing rules in state-dependent speciation-extinction models, revealing that distinct scenarios can produce identical tip state distributions and that inference on extant-only trees is biased toward certain scenarios due to the interplay of mixing rates, time, and likelihood conditioning.
This study demonstrates that isoform inflation and annotation heterogeneity in public genomes confound cross-phylum comparisons of Kunitz repertoires, revealing that apparent expansions in blood-feeding animals are often artifacts of data processing rather than genuine biological convergence.
This study reveals that the teleost whole-genome duplication led to the retention and functional diversification of parietopsin paralogs (PT1 and PT2) in specific lineages like the red piranha, where both genes exhibit slightly different spectral sensitivities yet remain co-expressed within the same pineal cells alongside parapinopsin.
This study demonstrates through experimental evolution that modifying developmental plasticity in response to cold stress can rapidly drive the evolution of obligate somatic differentiation in *Eudorina* algae, providing empirical evidence for how environmental responses facilitate the emergence of new evolutionary individuals.
This study reveals that asymmetrical sexual conflict drives heterogeneous macroevolutionary patterns in the water strider subgenus *Pseudovelia*, where male grasping trait diversification fuels rapid lineage radiation in South China while specific trait configurations modulate conflict intensity to enable flexible female counter-adaptations.
This study integrates protein-sequence evolution data from 18 mammalian species with 29 brain and body traits to identify specific genes whose evolutionary rates correlate with quantitative variations in mammalian brain cellular diversity and organization.
Using the AMES computational simulator, this study demonstrates that short random peptides accelerate RNA evolution and stabilize diverse structures, supporting the hypothesis that life originated in an "RNA-peptide world" where non-templated peptides interacted with RNA from the earliest stages.
This paper introduces a flexible, modular variational modeling framework based on generalized gradient-flow theory that unifies mutation, recombination, selection, and genetic drift to accurately simulate multilocus population genetic dynamics and enable scalable, differentiable inference.