One way to understand the role history plays on evolutionary trajectories is by giving ancient life a second opportunity to evolve. Our ability to empirically perform such an experiment, however, is limited by current experimental designs. Combining ancestral sequence reconstruction with synthetic biology allows us to resurrect the past within a modern context and has expanded our understanding...

This article develops and tests an evolutionay model of the growth, decline, and demographic dynamics of voluntay organizations. The model demonstrates a strong analogy between the adaptive landscape of Sewall Wright (1931) and the exploitation surfaces generated by a model of member selection and retention for voluntay associations. The article connects the processes of membership recruitment ...

Cross-national comparisons of relational work styles suggest that the United States is an anomaly in its low relational focus. This article describes Protestant Relational Ideology (PRI), a cultural construct that explains the origins and nature of this anomaly. This construct refers to a deepseated belief that affective and relational concerns are considered inappropriate in work settings and,...

•Aggregation-inducing antimicrobial Pept-ins are less prone to inducing resistance•Pept-in resistance mechanism is dominated by limiting Pept-in uptake•Pept-in uptake involves electrostatic attraction and likely many transporters Aggregation can be selectively induced aggregation-prone regions (APRs) contained in the target proteins. Aggregation-inducing peptides (Pept-ins) contain sequences ho...

A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. Environmental fluctuations present a fundamental challenge to organisms as changing conditions may result in mismatch between environment and organismal phenotypes. One way which populations persist thrive is through their capacity adapt phenotypes on time frame relevant environmental variation. The ab...

This study evaluated the impact computers had on the quality of writing in the third grade. This study was conducted over a six week period of time and took place in a regular education third grade classroom. The class consisted of sixteen students, ten boys and six girls. The students were required to complete two personal narrative writing samples. For the first writing sample, the students c...

This is an extended abstract of lectures delivered at the 4th Warsaw Summer School on Statistical Physics in Kazimierz Dolny, June 25-July 2, 2011. The mathematical theory of evolution is concerned with the changes in the genetic composition of populations that occur under the influence of the evolutionary forces of selection, mutation and demographic noise. In its focus on noisy, collective be...

Evolutionists frequently point to the development of antibiotic resistance by bacteria as a demonstration of evolutionary change. However, molecular analysis of the genetic events that lead to antibiotic resistance do not support this common assumption. Many bacteria become resistant by acquiring genes from plasmids or transposons via horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal transfer, though, does ...

Evolutionary genetics has recently made enormous progress in understanding how genetic variation maps into phenotypic variation. However, why some traits are phenotypically invariant despite apparent genetic and environmental changes has remained a major puzzle. In the 1940s, Conrad Hal Waddington coined the concept and term “canalization” to describe the robustness of phenotypes to perturbatio...

The human eye has been the cause of much controversy in regards to its complexity and how the human eye came to be. Through following and discussing the anatomical and physiological functions of the eye, a better understanding of the argument of origins can be seen. The anatomy of the human eye and its many functions are clearly seen, through its complexity. When observing the intricacy of visi...