This volume is based on the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “The Human Mental Machinery,” held January 11–12, 2013, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the ...

Evolution is biology's powerful method of engineering. It works by generating many variants of DNA, RNA, and proteins inside cells and letting nature "select" the organism that performs best. Early ...

Dragonflies can see deep red light using a mammal-like mechanism, revealing a surprising case of parallel evolution.

Scientists have developed a novel protein evolution approach dubbed optovolution that uses light to guide the evolution of proteins with dynamic, multi-state, and computational functions based on ...

The movement of genetic material from prokaryotes seemed like a plausible route for rhodopsins to make their way into eukaryotes, but researchers still wrestled with some of the details of this ...