Evolution

What’s yours is mine: evolution by adaptive introgression

Sean Buckley4 Comments

Gene flow and introgression

Genetic variation remains a key component of not only understanding the process and history of evolution, but also for allowing evolution to continue into the future. This is the basis of the concept of ‘evolutionary potential’ – the available variation within a population or species which may enable them to adapt to new environmental stressors as they occur. With the looming threat of contemporary climate change and environmental transformations by humanity, predicting and supporting evolutionary potential across the diversity of life is critical for conserving the stability of our biosphere.

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Products of their time: the impact of demographic history on evolution

Sean Buckley3 Comments

Demographic history

Many things in life are the product of their history, and nothing exemplifies this better than evolution. Given the often-gradual nature of evolution by natural selection, environmental stressors and factors operating on long-term scales (i.e. over thousands or millions of years) can have major impacts on evolutionary changes across the diversity of biota. While many of these are specific to the characteristics of the target organism (i.e. are related to adaptive traits), non-adaptive (neutral) traits are also critically important in driving the path of evolution.

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Islands of speciation and speciation on islands

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The concept of a species

We’ve spent some time before discussing the nature of the term ‘species’ and what it means in reality. Of course, answers to questions in biology are always more complicated than we wish they might be, and despite the common nomenclature of the word ‘species’ the underlying definition is convoluted and variable.

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Evolutionary clocks out of sync

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Evolutionary time

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with a basic understanding of evolution that it is a temporal (and also spatial concept). Time is a fundamental aspect of the process of evolution by natural selection, and without it evolution wouldn’t exist. But time is also a fickle thing, and although it remains constant (let’s not delve into that issue here) not all things experience it in the same way.

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Genes in parallel

Sean Buckley1 Comment

Adaptation from genetic variation

One of the central themes of this blog, and indeed of evolutionary biology as a whole, is the notion that adaptation is often underpinned by genes. Genetic variation acts as the basis for natural selection to favour or disfavour traits: while this is directly through phenotypic traits (e.g. fur colour, morphology, behaviour), these traits are typically determined by a genetic component. In the early stages of adaptation, evolution can often be observed by changes in the frequency of genetic variants (alleles) within a species or population over time as natural selection acts, gradually leading to the observable (and sometimes dramatic) change in species over time.

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