ANN ARBOR—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 ...

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, ...

While evolution involves changes in organisms that we can observe, they undergo evolution at a deeper level, too. That is, changes affect the "letters" (four different types of chemical units) in the ...

“One of the reasons for the popularity of the neutral theory was that it made things a lot easier,” said Andrew Kern, a population geneticist now at the University of Oregon, who contributed an ...

Biologists are closing in on a puzzle that seems to turn classic evolutionary logic inside out, yet may be so common that it deserves to be called a new rule of life. Instead of always purging harmful ...