The story of Charles Darwin’s life. His theory of evolution changed the way we understood our place in the world.

In the 1960s, Kimura’s neutral theory revolutionized molecular biology by arguing most DNA changes are random, not adaptive. A new study finds beneficial mutations are far more common than Kimura’s ...

For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ordinary ...

A random mutation in a gene can alter its function and bring about a new characteristic that can pass down for many generations, but this may not be the only way that organisms can inherit a trait.

Darwin’s ideas are, without question, powerful and have helped advance knowledge in nearly all academic domains. Darwin’s ideas of evolution led to the creation of the field we now call “biology” (see ...

Darwinian thinking has been challenged many times, starting with co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace, who disagreed with some aspects of Charles Darwin’s arguments, but was ...

For more than half a century, many biologists have leaned on the neutral theory of molecular evolution to explain how DNA and proteins change over time. The idea grew from early work in the 1960s, ...

On April 19, 1882, Charles Darwin, author of "On the Origin of Species" and the father of evolution, died at his home in Downe, England. He was 73. More than 30 years later, in 1915, across the ...