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Tag 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
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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What makes a range?
Why do species have restricted geographic distributions? Classic ecological perspectives tell us distribution limits occur where ecological parameters coincide with the boundaries of ecological niches. Evolutionary perspectives, on the other hand, surmise distribution boundaries reflect a failure of niche evolution. Though small … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, plants, selection, theory
Tagged ecology, Evolution, latitude, multivariate traits, quantitative genetics, Range limits
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When times are good or bad, happy or sad, viral quasispecies like to stay together
We’ve known for a long time that symbioses are important across all walks of life. Clownfish and sea anemones are obligate symbionts, and bacteria found in legume root nodules help fix nitrogen. In a nice review published recently in Evolutionary … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Coevolution, evolution
Tagged Evolution, holobiont, human health, quasispecies
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There and back again: an angiosperm's tale
Eelgrass (Zostera marina) is the dominant seagrass in the northern hemisphere and provides the foundation of highly productive ecosystems that rival tropical rain forests and coral reefs in ecosystem services. Zostera isn’t really a grass, but a monocot, like a … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, community ecology, evolution, genomics, plants
Tagged Evolution, genome, plants, salinity, seagrass
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An evolutionary cycle …
Rescan, Lenormand and Roze (2016) recently published new models on the evolution of life cycles in The American Naturalist. Most animals and protists have diploid life cycles in which the haploid stage is reduced to a single-celled gamete. Other organisms, such … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, haploid-diploid, mutation, selection, transcriptomics
Tagged Evolution, haploid-diploid, life cycle, models, selection
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