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.
A meta-experimental evolution study across 14 diverse species demonstrates that environmental complexity, characterized by multiple simultaneous stressors, generally constrains adaptive evolution and reduces fitness gains compared to single stressors, though these effects vary by species and stressor type.
This study employs a multiscale protein similarity network analysis across 115 insect species to reveal how the evolutionary history of odorant receptors, marked by the emergence of Orco and shaped by the end-Permian mass extinction, has driven ecological tuning in olfactory perception through associations with diet, circadian rhythm, and habitat.
This paper proposes the "Mamas Boy Hypothesis," arguing that menopause evolves in species with male philopatry because post-reproductive females increase their inclusive fitness by providing life-saving care to their resident sons and grandsons rather than continuing to reproduce themselves.
This paper proposes a stochastic PK/PD-based Markov chain model that incorporates *de novo* mutation and drug-induced mutation to demonstrate that replication-targeting antibiotics and higher drug doses are more effective at preventing the emergence of antibiotic resistance than death-targeting drugs or intermediate concentrations.
This paper presents a flexible mathematical and simulation model that integrates genetic architecture and physiological constraints to predict the evolutionary trajectories of thermal performance curves, successfully explaining complex dynamics like multi-generation lags and individual variability observed in real-world data such as that of the invasive pest *Drosophila suzukii*.
This paper demonstrates that persistent homology applied to genetic-distance data serves as a robust topological observable for detecting and characterizing reticulate evolutionary processes, such as recombination and selective sweeps, across diverse pathogen and plant genomes.
This paper proposes and evaluates the "Driving W Hypothesis," suggesting that the rapid spread of female-biased, transmission-advantageous W chromosomes in ZW species carries linked mitochondrial genomes to fixation, thereby explaining observed patterns of low within-population mitochondrial diversity and inter-population mitochondrial transfer.
This study combines statistical and phylodynamic modeling to reveal that while most H5Nx reassortants during the 2020–2024 global panzootic were transient, a small fraction of "major" strains originating primarily in Europe achieved widespread success driven by ecological factors like sustained circulation in specific wild bird orders and broader host niche detection.
This study demonstrates that parasites evolving at epidemic fronts undergo eco-evolutionary feedbacks where selection for host dispersal leads to reduced virulence and increased infectivity, ultimately accelerating the speed of epidemic spread.
By leveraging telomere-to-telomere primate genomes and long-read data, this study establishes a comparative framework revealing that tandem repeats are subject to both stabilizing and directional selection, with specific signatures of adaptive evolution in neural development and gene regulation distinguishing humans from chimpanzees.