The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis formalizes the role of variation, heredity, differential reproduction, and mutation in population genetics. Here we explore a mathematical structure, based on the ...

The first public lecture I attended as a new graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1965 was by the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, who died on July 4 at age 92. Its subject was ...

Ironically, one great unsolved problem in Darwin's master work, On the Origin of Species, was just that: How and why do species originate? Darwin and his later followers were faced with a seeming ...

Expanding the modern synthesis requires elevating the role of interaction within and across various biological scales to the status of an evolutionary principle. One way to do this is to characterize ...

The question of how human societies evolve from small groups to the huge, anonymous and complex societies of today has been answered mathematically, accurately matching the historical record on the ...

On the 31st of May, 1984, the late evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith appraised the field of paleontology in the journal Nature. The report was a critical summary of a series of lectures Stephen ...

Humans aren't the only ones who grow old gracefully, says a new study of primate aging patterns. For a long time it was thought that humans, with our relatively long life spans and access to modern ...