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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

BROAD VARIABILITY. “The niches created by gene transfer events vary widely in their stability or novelty. Some events, like the acquisition of an antibiotic resistance gene, allow for transient exploration of a new environment, but this lineage may not persist over evolutionary time (that is, this event will likely not found a clade of antibiotic-resistant bacteria distinguished by their shared ability to be resistant to a particular antibiotic).” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

BROOD SURVIVAL ADVANTAGE. “In the U.K. the great tits with the genes for shorter beaks had fewer surviving chicks per year than those with longer ones...although the difference is small this probably means the latter were better able to bring seeds back to their young.” Millimeters count. https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn