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PRE- AND POST-PLAGUE. “Given that the mortality associated with the Black Death was extraordinarily high and selective, the medieval epidemic might have powerfully shaped patterns of health and demography in the surviving population, producing a post-Black Death population that differed in many significant ways, at least over the short term, from the population that existed just before the epidemic.” https://lnkd.in/g2FqTm7 View in LinkedIn

SONG OF DARWIN. "The more I study nature, the more I become impressed […] that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations [acquired through natural selection] transcend in an incomparable degree [those] which the most fertile imagination of the most imaginative man could suggest with unlimited time at his disposal." https://lnkd.in/eykUy37 View in LinkedIn

POSITIVE IMPACT OF DEPOPULATION. “With as much as half of the population dead, survivors in the post-plague era had more resources available to them. Historical documentation records an improvement in diet, especially among the poor.” https://lnkd.in/ggGWR4A View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE offers an historical snapshot of the rat flea derived bacterial bubonic plague that halved the European, Asian and African population in the mid-fourteenth century. It still exists today, and can be treated with antibiotics, with a 1-15% mortality rate. The Black Death had very profound social and cultural impacts on European society. It also partially protected the surviving population against later outbreaks. View in LinkedIn

GENETIC SELECTION BY PLAGUE. “The identification of the immune pathways and genetic variants that were specifically selected in Europe not only helps us to understand the evolutionary history of European populations, but also contributes to our understanding of the differences in susceptibility between European and other populations to modern human diseases.” https://lnkd.in/gcJ7VHH View in LinkedIn

SPECIATION QUESTIONS. "Models of adaptive speciation are typically concerned with demonstrating that it is possible for ecologically driven disruptive selection to lead to the evolution of assortative mating and hence speciation. However, disruptive selection could also lead to other forms of evolutionary diversification, including ecological sexual dimorphisms."" "DOI: 10.1111/j.0014-3820.2003.tb01489.x View in LinkedIn

IMMUNE STRENGTHENING. “Netea and his colleagues tested the ability of the toll-like receptors to react to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that caused the Black Death. They found that the strength of the immune response varied depending on the exact sequence of the toll-like receptor genes.” https://lnkd.in/gWy9UtF View in LinkedIn

CHALLENGING. "When species differ in both ecological and sexual characters, it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between character divergence that is a cause or a result of species divergence." https://lnkd.in/ggrcHvH View in LinkedIn

GENOME MODIFICATION. “The plague did write itself into human genomes: The descendants of plague-affected populations share certain changes in some immune genes.” https://lnkd.in/ggGWR4A View in LinkedIn

Beyond Catalonia: pro-independence movements in Europe View in LinkedIn