A paper recently appearing in Science (Näsvall et al. 2012) offers a new insights into the mechanisms by which gene duplication can lead to new genes, gene products, and functions. The new scheme is termed the innovation-amplification-divergence (IAD) model. The...
Peter and Rosemary Grant have been responsible for what must be among the longest-running continuous field studies in evolutionary biology (2011). It will reach forty years in 2013. In this work, the Grants closely follow multiple species of finches on the Galápagos...
Influenza A viruses continue to be of enormous interest to biomedical researchers and clinicians alike. In addition to the annual influenza epidemics, which have been inferred to cause substantial excess mortality, there is the ever-present threat of a global...
In the book, The Winner-Take-All Society (1995), Robet H. Frank and Philip J. Cook discuss a hypothetical scenario in which a new genetic technique allows babies to be engineered so that they have a 99% chance of performing 15% better on the standardized tests used in...
A common consequence of the evolutionary process in many species is extensive genetic diversity. As has become apparent in recent studies (Tennessen et al., Science 2012; Nelson et al., Science 2012), the growth of the human population coupled with what is believed...
