In this article, I propose a new way of thinking about natural necessity and a new way of
thinking about biological laws. I suggest that much of the lack of progress in making a …

Reconstructing ancestral species is a challenging endeavour: fossils are often scarce or
enigmatic, and inferring ancestral characters based on novel molecular approaches (eg …

The present thesis investigates molecular and ecological effects of different reproductive
modes on oribatid mites as model organisms (Acari, Oribatida). The investigation of the …

The comparative method has enabled us to trace distant phylogenetic relationships among
languages and reconstruct extinct languages from the past. Nonetheless, it has limitations …

The aim of this contribution is to investigate certain selected parts of the extended
evolutionary synthesis which all have a common denominator, namely evolution by meaning …

Following a recent re-evaluation of evidence from an archaeological site in SE Australia, the
possibility of a 120 thousand years (ka) old human presence in the Fifth Continent has been …

This chapter is the story of how I pioneered ants as a system for studying eco-evo-devo, a
field that integrates developmental biology with ecology and evolutionary biology. One aim …

In suggesting that the rules that govern the evolution of cumulative culture are observed in
all modern societies, gene-culture coevolution theory implies that the biases that affect the …

Glycosylation of proteins in prokaryotes has been known for the last few decades. Glycan
structures and/or the glycosylation pathways have been experimentally characterized in only …

Multicellular organisms appeared on Earth through several independent major evolutionary
transitions. Are such transitions reversible? Addressing this fundamental question entails …