Beneficial mutations happen quite frequently, but the world changes too fast for them to stick.

When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book’s gene-centred view of evolution still has much to ...

When Charles Darwin first proposed how evolution works in 1859, it seemed plausible. Tiny changes stack up over time, eventually leading a species to become something entirely different. Aside from ...

When Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution in the mid-19th century, he figured this fundamental process took place very slowly over geological timescales, taking millions of years. But is ...