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 ...

Scientists showed that fixed mutations within a viral population most likely stem from how easy it is to acquire that mutation (i.e., mutation accessibility) rather than just its benefit. The ...

For more than half a century, many biologists have leaned on the neutral theory of molecular evolution to explain how DNA and proteins change over time. The idea grew from early work in the 1960s, ...