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PRECEDENT SITUATIONS. “There are documented instances—such as studies on Darwin’s finches—that show evolution of beak length results from differences in food availability.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

RESTRUCTURING. “Recognition of gene transfer within and among lineages restructures microbial evolution in more ways than offering new interpretations of the pattern of microbial phylogeny.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

STUFFED BEAK LENGTHS. “The researchers then scoured museum collections and looked at specimens of the birds collected since the 1920s to confirm their findings. Something about the U.K. environment was giving longer beaks an edge.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

SCALE AND SOURCE. “Horizontal gene transfer likely affects different lineages in different fashions, perhaps illustrated most dramatically by the minimal contribution of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of intracellular parasites undergoing genome reduction. Consideration of scale and source can serve as effective arbiters when reconciling data collected from diverse systems.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION IN THIRTY YEARS. “Even just in the last 30 years we’ve seen the beak lengths getting longer in the U.K. population.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

DIFFERENT TIMELINES. “Horizontal gene transfer confounds evolutionary relationships most strongly on broad timescales, whereas vertical inheritance—propagating mutational changes, gene rearrangements, and other intragenomic alterations—and gene exchange by homologous recombination dominate over the short term.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

BEAK LENGTH GENES. “The scientists suspected these genes could be linked to beak length, so they measured this anatomical feature in U.K. great tits. They found birds with that handful of favored genes, as expected, tended to have longer beaks than their continental counterparts in the Netherlands.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

MINORITY BACTERIAL HORIZONTAL TRANSFERS. “Yet such results are not inconsistent with horizontal gene transfer having a dominant impact on the evolution of prokaryotic genomes in the long term. Transfers occurring prior to the diversification of a group such as the enterobacteria can only be detected in larger phylogenetic reconstructions.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

HOMOLOGOUS GENES. “They then labeled around 30 of the genes that seemed to oust all the others and scanned the scientific literature to figure out what role these genes played in other organisms. It turns out many of them are involved in human skull development and bill length in Darwin’s finches—Galápagos Islands birds that served as the famed biologist’s most famous subjects.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

SHIFTING GENE PROFILES. “Favored genes had nudged their way into these areas and, with time, pushed out most other genes that might have been found there—a clear indication natural selection was at work, according to the researchers.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn