Year: 2022

PLASTICITY BUFFER. “Plasticity may also serve to buffer populations from environmental change, thus reducing the risk of extinction and making adaptive evolution possible.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

ALL ABOUT FITNESS. “Maternal effects are like phenotypic plasticity in that they can change fitness in the absence of genetic change, and can thereby alter the frequencies of phenotypes. Moreover, reaction norms (patterns of plasticity) and maternal effects may both evolve substantially across just a few generations, thus changing the response of organisms to environmental heterogeneity.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

IMPACT OF GENE FLOW. “Contemporary evolution will be strongly influenced by rates and patterns of gene flow and dispersal. For example, gene flow may hinder adaptive differentiation by reducing the genetic independence of populations inhabiting different selective environments, but may sometimes promote adaptive differentiation by supplementing the genetic variation on which selection can act.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

INTERRELATED DYNAMICS. “One of the main implications of this perspective is that environmental change will alter the complex, dynamic relationships between adaptation and gene flow, and will therefore influence adaptive divergence and speciation. Gene flow may have similar complicated and dynamic influences on population persistence.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

RELATIONS BETWEEN SPECIES. “The eco-evolutionary dynamics of interspecific interactions may strongly influence community dynamics, food web structure and ecosystem function. Some of the best examples here come from interactions between hosts and pathogens in introduced species.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

NEW CONVERSATION. “The frequency, magnitude and importance of evolution on ecological time-scales are likely to grow as human environmental impacts increase and their effects ramify. The dialogue in evolutionary biology will soon be dominated by discussions of systems in which evolution is ongoing, directional and in many cases non-reversing because environments are changed so substantially.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

ACCESSIBLE TO STUDY. “Empirically, the reality of contemporary evolution means that many evolutionary processes thought approachable only by inferential study, such as speciation, can now be studied directly.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this expansion of the observation of the rapid evolution of Great Tits’ beaks in response to bird feeders in the UK. The backstory tells us that this is a broad trend across taxa, and that it is particularly observed in response to human disruption. The opportunity to watch in real time vertebrate evolution in the making is an extraordinary step forward, as such studies in the past have been confined to yeast and bacteria. View in LinkedIn

WE RETURN to the bold attempt to revise our pear-shaped view of the natural world, which has been cast with a chordate-centric viewpoint, oblivious of the much larger and, until recently, unseen, prokaryotic universe. The prokaryotic universe is the greatest source of global biodiversity, and it is neither based on the individual nor the species. All very confounding for our earnest and bespectacled colleagues in gumboots. https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

WRENCHING CHANGES. “Not only will biodiversity informatics need to deal with an explosion in the amount of biodiversity-relevant data, it may well need to accommodate data that are of a conceptually different form. As any informatics professional knows, making changes to an underlying data model is always difficult and fraught with risk. Making changes to conceptual base classes is the hardest of all. This will be the world of 21st Century biodiversity informatics.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn