A new vision for how evolution works

Hello Nature readers,
Today we discover the most-studied bacteria — and learn that the majority have been ignored. Plus, we explore the complex reasons that are driving the deadly Los Angeles wildfires and ponder a new vision for how evolution works.

Ten bacteria hog scientists’ attention

Scientists have identified more than 45,000 bacterial species — but just a handful of these have been deeply studied. Paul Jensen, a microbial-systems biologist, discovered that just 10 bacterial species account for half of all publications, whereas nearly three-quarters of all named bacteria don’t have a single paper devoted to them. “Automating microbiology with robotics and artificial intelligence will accelerate our field, but we need to apply these tools to the myriad species that live in the understudied corners of our world,” Jensen wrote, including ones important to human health and those found in the ocean or soil.

Facebook axes fact-checking: does it matter?

Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced plans to scrap the platform’s fact-checking programme, which pays independent groups to verify selected articles and posts. The programme could be replaced by a system similar to the ‘community notes’ used by X (née Twitter), in which corrections and context are crowdsourced from users and added to posts. “Studies provide very consistent evidence that fact-checking does at least partially reduce misperceptions about false claims,” says social psychologist Sander van der Linden. “Replacing fact checking with community notes just seems like it would make things a lot worse.”

A new take on an old theory

“Evolution must proceed where development leads,” write Kevin Lala and four other eminent evolutionary biologists in their book Evolution Evolving. Their argument challenges a central tenet of the theory of evolution, reasoning that the development of an organism impacts its evolution, not just natural selection. Their intention is not to overthrow modern thinking, but to offer “a fresh vision of how evolution works”, writes evolutionary geneticist Eva Jablonka in her review. “It’s rare that researchers question theories that make up the backbone of whole fields,” says Jablonka. But Lala and his colleagues “do just that”.

Why I gave my spin-off a silly name

Genomics researcher Richard Kuo launched a biotech spin-off company called Wobble Genomics, which is using breast-cancer testing as a proof-of-concept for the idea that long-read RNA sequencing can be used to detect signs of diseases in the blood. Along with the tech-transfer team at his university, he was aided by a government grant programme and mentorship by a life-sciences venture capitalist. As for the name, it came from Francis Crick’s term for the way that for every three nucleotides, the third base in that triplet could pair in a more flexible way, or with a ‘wobble’. “I had this test for myself: if your company name could be used as the name of an evil organization in a sci-fi film, it’s probably not a great name,” says Kuo. “I thought, with Wobble Genomics, that probably wouldn’t happen.”