In their search to understand the evolution of biological complexity, John Maynard Smith and
Eörs Szathmáry put forward the notion of major evolutionary transitions as those in which …

Geoghegan and Holmes describe the history of evolutionary ideas in the study of viruses,
showing that two different approaches to studying virus evolution—the comparative and the …

A recent empirical study by Turner and Chao on the evolution of competitive interactions
among phage virus strains revealed that a strain grown at high rates of co‐infection evolved …

Viral studies have contributed substantially to the field of experimental evolution during the
last two decades. The rapid evolution of RNA viruses makes them especially suitable for …

In the last two decades, viruses have been used as model systems to study evolution in
short periods of time. Due to their characteristics, virus adapt rapidly to changing conditions …

The extent to which viruses and their hosts codiverge remains an open question, given that
numerous cases of both “cospeciation” and horizontal switching have recently been …

RNA viruses have an extremely high mutation rate, and we argue that the most plausible
explanation for this is a trade-off with replication speed. We suggest that research into further …

The mutant spectrum of a virus quasispecies in the process of fitness gain of a debilitated
foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) clone has been analysed. The mutant spectrum was …

Although differing rates of environmental turnover should be consequential for the dynamics
of adaptive change, this idea has been rarely examined outside of theory. In particular, the …

RNA viruses offer a unique opportunity for the study of evolution at the molecular level.
Recent experiments involving clonal populations of RNA viruses have shown that …