This book presents 15 selected contributions to the 22nd Evolutionary Biology Meeting, which took place in September 2018 in Marseille. They are grouped under the following major themes:

·        Origin of Life

·        Concepts and Methods

·        Genome and Phenotype Evolution

The aims of these annual meetings in Marseille are to bring together leading evolutionary biologists and other scientists who employ evolutionary biology concepts, e.g. for medical research, and to promote the exchange of ideas and encourage interdisciplinary collaborations.

Offering an up-to-date overview of recent advances in the field of evolutionary biology, this book represents an invaluable source of information for scientists, teachers and advanced students.

Part I: Origin of Life, A Non-paradoxical Pathway for the Chemical Evolution toward the Most Primitive RNA-based Life-like System

Formation of Nucleosides and Nucleotides in Chemical Evolution
The First Universal Common Ancestor (FUCA) as the earliest ancestor of LUCA's (Last UCA) lineage
Part II: Concepts and Methods, Repeatability and predictability in experimental evolution
RetroSpect, a new method of measuring gene regulatory evolution rates using co-mapping of genomic functional features with transposable elements
Methods to Detect and Associate Divergence in cis-regulatory elements to Phenotypic Divergence
A look back over 20 years of evo-devo studies on sponges: a challenged view of Urmetazoa
A geometric morphometrics-based mapping model of leaf shape evolution
Allostery and Structural Dynamics in Protein Evolution
Coevolutionary approaches to the science of language
Part III: Genome and Phenotype Evolution, The parallel lives of human Y-chromosome lineages across the Strait of Gibraltar
Vertebrate genome size and the impact of transposable elements in genome evolution
Genetic Diversity of the Apoptotic Pathway in Insects
Xenacoelomorpha, a key group to understand Bilaterian Evolution: Morphological and Molecular Perspectives
Cooperation and Competition in Mammalian Evolution-gene domestication from LTR Retrotransposons.