In the long conversation between life and change, few questions cut deeper than why some organisms rewrite their own genetic code quickly while others hold nearly still. A team of evolutionary biologists across four institutions, anchored at the University of Houston and supported by $2.08 million in National Science Foundation funding, is now positioned to pursue that question with unusual rigor — comparing how sexual, asexual, and self-pollinating reproduction shapes the speed of mutation across wildly different organisms. Their findings may illuminate not only the mechanics of evolution its