Joanna Baker

University of Reading · Department of Environmental Biology

The fact that rapid brain size increase was clearly a key aspect of human evolution has prompted many studies focusing on this phenomenon, and many suggestions as to the underlying evolutionary patterns and processes. No study to date has however separated out the contributions of change through time within vs. between hominin species while simulta...

The human hand is one of our most remarkable features. We have long, opposable thumbs and a suite of other features argued to be adaptations for interacting with and manipulating our environment, literally extending the reach of our cognitive powers. Consequently, enhanced manipulative dexterity, tool use and increased brain size are considered key...

The most influential hypothesis about euprimate evolution postulates that their origin, radiation, and major dispersals, were associated with the exceptional warmer conditions of the planet in the tropical forests of higher latitudes. However, this notion has proven difficult to test given the overall uncertainty about the geographic locations and...

A large brain relative to body mass is considered a distinguishing hominin trait. It has frequently been related to a suite of social, behavioral, technological, and other cognitive adaptations that differentiate humans from other species. The processes underlying large brain size evolution have therefore been a subject of rigorous scientific debat...

Despite decades of comparative studies, puzzling aspects of the relationship between mammalian brain and body mass continue to defy satisfactory explanation. Here we show that several such aspects arise from routinely fitting log-linear models to the data: the correlated evolution of brain and body mass is in fact log-curvilinear. This simultaneous...

The fact that rapid brain size increase was clearly a key aspect of human evolution has prompted many studies focussing on this phenomenon, and many suggestions as to the underlying evolutionary patterns and processes. No study to date has however separated out the contributions of change through time within- vs. between- hominin species whilst sim...

The perception of taste (here defined as a combination of taste, odour and chemesthesis) enables animals to find high-value foods and avoid toxins. Humans have learned to use unpalatable and toxic substances as medicines, yet the importance of taste perception in this process is poorly understood. Here we generate tasting-panel data for botanical d...

Despite decades of comparative studies, fundamental questions remain about how brain and body size co-evolved. Divergent explanations exist concurrently in the literature for phenomena such as variation in brain relative to body size, variability in the scaling relationship across taxonomic levels and between taxonomic groups, and purported evoluti...

Background Testes vary widely in mass relative to body mass across species, but we know very little about which genes underlie and contribute to such variation. This is partly because evidence for which genes are implicated in testis size variation tends to come from investigations involving just one or a few species. Contemporary comparative phylo...

The long-term accumulation of biodiversity has been punctuated by remarkable evolutionary transitions that allowed organisms to exploit new ecological opportunities. Mesozoic flying reptiles (the pterosaurs), which dominated the skies for more than 150 million years, were the product of one such transition. The ancestors of pterosaurs were small an...

In a recent paper, Poe et al. (2020) assert that scientists should abandon clade-based approaches, particularly those using named taxonomic ranks. Poe et al (2020) attempt to demonstrate that clade selection can have effects on the results of evolutionary analyses, but unfortunately fall short of making any robust conclusions. Here we demonstrate t...

Genital coevolution is a pervasive phenomenon as changes in one sex tend to impose fitness consequences on the other generating sexual conflict. Sexual conflict is often thought to cause stronger selection on males due to the Darwin‐Bateman's anisogamy paradigm. However, recent studies have demonstrated that female genitalia may be equally elaborat...

Larger testes produce more sperm and therefore improve reproductive success in the face of sperm competition. Adaptation to social mating systems with relatively high and low sperm competition are therefore likely to have driven changes in relative testes size in opposing directions. Here, we combine the largest vertebrate testes mass dataset ever...

The rate of morphological evolution along the branches of a phylogeny varies widely [1-6]. Although such rate variation is often assumed to reflect the strength of historical natural selection resulting in adaptation [7-14], this lacks empirical and analytical evidence. One way to demonstrate a relationship between branchwise rates and adaptation w...

Rates of phenotypic evolution vary widely in nature and these rates may often reflect the intensity of natural selection. Here we outline an approach for detecting exceptional shifts in the rate of phenotypic evolution across phylogenies. We introduce a simple new branch-specific metric ∆V/∆B that divides observed phenotypic change along a branch i...

Significance Understanding growth of fish is important, both for regulating harvests of wild populations for sustained yields, and for using artificial selection and genetic engineering to increase productivity of domesticated fish stocks. We developed theory to account for how growth rate varies with body size, within individuals as they grow to m...

Supplementary material to the paper

Why some organisms become invasive when introduced into novel regions while others fail to even establish is a fundamental question in ecology. Barriers to success are expected to filter species at each stage along the invasion pathway. No study to date, however, has investigated how species traits associate with success from introduction to spread...

Significance There is a long-held notion that bigger body sizes are intrinsically advantageous. We demonstrate an overwhelming tendency for rapid morphological change to lead to larger body size in 10 of the 11 largest mammal orders, suggesting that mammals have consistently evolved toward larger size, most likely as a response to selection pressur...

This paper details the development of a portable ‘Lab on chip’ DNA analyser that was developed to facilitate rapid analysis of DNA samples for ‘at scene of crime’ and in custody suite situations where human identification is required rapidly. This system was proven to work with human DNA for 3 loci, namely VWA, D21 and D18 taken from raw sample thr...