When the first spark of life emerged on a young, ocean-covered Earth some four billion years ago, it didn’t happen at once. The process was slow and drawn out over eons, with lifeless chemicals slowly ...

How can we know what life on Earth looked like more than three billion years ago, when rocks from that era are so rare and ...

Assembly Theory is a way to understand how the complexity of life emerged through a mechanism of “self-assembly.” It could explain how life formed on Earth—or other planets—via the shortest path to ...

It is the ultimate mystery of biology: How did life begin? A team of Harvard scientists has brought us closer to an answer by creating artificial cell-like chemical systems that simulate metabolism, ...

More than half a billion years ago on a frigid, ice-covered Earth, glaciers stirred up ingredients for complex life by bulldozing land minerals and then depositing them in the ocean, according to a ...

Scientists have discovered that complex life began evolving much earlier than traditional models suggested. Using an expanded molecular clock approach, the team showed that crucial cellular features ...

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life ...

A new computer model suggests that the process of evolution can get better at evolving in the face of environmental change. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

Research is shaking up how we think about evolution, suggesting there's a level of predictability influenced by genes and ...

The first plants came from algae around 470 million years ago, slowly spreading on land and helping create oxygen and soil ...

Questions about the origin and nature of Earth and the life on it have long preoccupied human thought and the scientific endeavor. Deciphering the planet's history and processes could improve the ...