Assembly Theory is a way to understand how the complexity of life emerged through a mechanism of “self-assembly.” It could explain how life formed on Earth—or other planets—via the shortest path to ...

A tree of life based on genes from across the nuclear genome and containing nearly 60% of all angiosperm genera unveils the complex evolutionary history of flowering plants. This tree both ...

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

Scientists have identified tubulin structures in primitive Asgard archea that may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons. In 2010, biologists made a shocking discovery. Living in the ...

Earth's surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks ...

In fact, it's happened so often that there's a scientific term for it: carcinization. If you close your eyes and think of a crab, you might picture a round, flat body. Big front claws and multiple ...

All species on Earth, both living and extinct, are related. We know this because of a biological tool called the tree of life. This "tree" takes the form of a diagram that maps the relationships ...