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WIDESPREAD PHENOMENA. “Across a wide range of taxa, this contemporary evolution has been observed in many biological contexts, on fine spatial scales, and in the presence of gene flow.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

ANTHROPOGENIC IMPACT. “Contemporary evolution occurs in a wide diversity of ecological contexts, but appears to be especially common in response to anthropogenic changes in selection and population structure.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

GEOLOGICAL VERSUS CONTEMPORANEOUS. “Ecologically significant evolutionary change, occurring over tens of generations or fewer, is now widely documented in nature. These findings counter the long-standing assumption that ecological and evolutionary processes occur on different time-scales.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

GALÁPAGOS FINCHES. “A human influence on beak-size evolution is not new, we have seen signs of this in finches on an inhabited island (Santa Cruz) of the Galápagos, but an association with bird feeders is new.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

RADICAL ORGANISMS IN UNREACHABLE NICHES. “Examples of such lineages include the green plants (acquiring chloroplast by endosymbiosis, methanotrophs (gaining the ability to synthesize critical cofactors by acquiring genes from methanogenic archaea, cyanobacteria (gaining a second photosystem allowing oxygenic photosynthesis, and bacteria exploiting halorhodopsin homologues as light-driven proton pumps.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

THE PEPPERED MOTH. “Yet the idea humans may be influencing evolution is not new. One well-known example involves moths that evolved a darker coloration as camouflage in the soot-covered backdrop of the industrial revolution.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

NICHE SALTATIONS. “Rarely, a gene transfer event may allow for the formation of radically different organisms that inhabit niches completely unreachable by organisms relying on mutational processes alone to explore environments.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

BETTER GATHERERS. “The researchers also tagged the birds to count the amount of times they visited the feeders, finding longer-beaked ones showed up at the feeders more often than their more stubby-beaked cousins.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

MICROBIAL DARK MATTER. “Now, metagenomic tools are forcing a recognition that there are no completely objective individuals, no unique lineages, and no one true tree. The newly revealed biosphere of microbial dark matter cannot be understood merely by extending the concepts and methods of eukaryotic macrobiology.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

“CLASSICAL BIOLOGY asserts that individual organisms and species are fundamental units of ecology, evolution, and biodiversity, composing an evolutionary history of objectively real, lineage-defined groups in a single-rooted tree of life.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn