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Category Archives: evolution
Ice-Age Euro-trips
Recent works that attempt to get at human migrations inside Europe paint a complex portrait of migratory events, admixture with archaic hominids, and adaptive evolution to new geographies, and a changing global climate. Analyzing whole genomes of 51 ancient humans … Continue reading
On Integrative Species Delimitation…
Accurate delimitation of species is a fundamental first step that underlies much of what we do in biology. But this can prove challenging in many situations. Why? Let me count the ways. Incomplete lineage sorting, hybridization, morphological conservatism, and niche … Continue reading
Signatures of the reproductive lottery
In marine populations, effective population sizes are usually several orders of magnitude lower than the census size. This difference is thought to be driven by high fecundity, variation in reproductive success and pronounced early mortality, resulting in genetic drift across generations. In … Continue reading
What does the island fox say?
Small populations are characterized by large drift and reduced efficacy of selection effects, which result in fixation of both advantageous and deleterious alleles, accumulation of homozygosity, and often reduction in population fitness. What with plummeting mammal populations across biota, understanding … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, mutation, natural history, population genetics, selection
Tagged Evolution, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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Disentangling the wolf-coyote admixture through an ancestry-based approach
Large carnivores like bears and wolves still pose a puzzle for systematics and population genetics. The more data we get, the more complex their evolutionary history seems to be.
Posted in conservation, evolution, genomics, population genetics
Tagged admixture, coyote, introgression, wolf
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The slow, and sometimes incomplete, journey to diploidy
Whether you are reading this as a plant, an animal, or fungus, it is likely that some ancestor of yours doubled up on genomes. However, it is likely that these extra genomes disappeared over evolutionary time. What gives? Where are those extra … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, genomics, quantitative genetics, speciation
Tagged Bob Ross, polyploidy, whole genome duplication
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Sweeps and Demographic Inference
Population genetics presents us with numerous conundrums – several of which have to do with how the same genomic disposition can be “reached” over evolutionary time with multiple alternate demographic or selective processes. I have discussed several of these issues … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, population genetics, selection, theory
Tagged gene flow, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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One of these things is not like the other……
While we know that bacteria are pretty scandalous with their DNA, not minding horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and such (which can be pretty confounding when trying to discuss species concepts), and although it’s clear that this kind of genetic material … Continue reading
The simpler cichlid: a recent adaptive radiation
If I was asked to name a few of the most compelling systems in evolutionary biology, I’d certainly start with Darwin’s Finches. Next might come peppered moths, African cichlids, stickleback, Caribbean Anolis lizards, or Lenski’s E. coli. What’s interesting about … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, selection, speciation
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