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 ordinary ...

That concept was so powerful that we might assume evolution is all about adaptation. So it can be surprising to learn that for half a century, a prevailing view in scholarly circles has been that it’s ...

Genes hold the recipe for proteins, which are made of amino acids. DNA only has four letters, or nucleotides, and each sequence of three nucleotide bases, or codon, encodes for one amino acid. There ...

Ever since the genetic code was cracked, those mutations have generally been assumed to be neutral, or nearly so. But in a study published online June 8 in the journal Nature that involved the genetic ...