Evolutionary Biology - Science topic

Termites (Blattodea: Isoptera) are eusocial insects comprising over 3,000 species distributed mainly in the tropical regions. These insects live in colonies consisting of hundreds to millions of individuals. Termite provide benefits associated with their crucial role in ecosystem functioning by contributing to waste decomposition, soil formation, n...

The Lymnaeidae (also known as 'pond snails') are a species-rich and globally distributed family of freshwater snails, many species of which are known to be hosts of parasitic trematodes (such as the liver fluke, Fasciola hepatica). Written by world-leading experts in the field, this book covers a wealth of topics, ranging from the phylogeny and tax...

Aim Genetic diversity driven by natural selection contributes to population divergence in amphibians, thus facilitating local adaptation to climate change. Understanding the mechanisms of genetic adaptation is one of the important issues in evolutionary biology. This study set out to reveal drivers responsible for intraspecific divergence in Fejerv...

The theories of evolution have earned a lot of respect for nature. But the construction of arguments continues both in support and against the theories. The modern research related to genetics, evolution, mutation, learning, inheritance and ecology are accumulating all possible evidences substantiated till date but seem to miss a crucial element, w...

In order to describe the time evolution of energy states we choose to abandon the non-relativistic Hamiltonian method, which has been the standard for nearly a century, in favor of a more fundamental, relativistically correct Lagrangian method based on theories originally proposed by Dirac and Einstein. Integral equations of motion for the absorpti...

Understanding genetic incompatibilities and genetic introgression between incipient species are major goals in evolutionary biology. Mitochondrial genes evolve rapidly and exist in dense gene networks with coevolved nuclear genes, suggesting that mitochondrial respiration may be particularly susceptible to disruption in hybrid organisms. Mitonuclea...

In the human context, the ubiquitous faculty of imagination is taken for granted. Whether we are singularly equipped with this ability or whether it is an evolved faculty also present in other life forms is a question that has been an issue ever since Darwin. A variety of research projects have indicated the presence of mental processes in non-huma...

The geographic variation in life-history traits of organisms and the mechanisms underlying adaptation are interesting ideas in evolutionary biology. This study investigated age and body size of the Asian common toad (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) among five populations along a geographical gradient. We found that geographical variation in age was non...

In recent years, some scholars have explicitly questioned the desirability or utility of applying the classical and “old-fashioned” theories of scientific change by the likes of Karl Popper and Thomas S. Kuhn to the question of the precise nature and significance of the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). Supposedly, these twentieth-century phil...

Technological developments increasingly enable monitoring and steering the behavior of individuals. Enforcement of the law by means of technology can be much more effective and pervasive than enforcement by humans, such as law enforcement officers. However, it can also bypass legislators and courts and minimize any room for civil disobedience. This...

Some psychologists claim “new evidence” that genes, not racism, are primarily responsible for racial differences in education, income, and incarceration, a claim that is taken up by those promoting racial inequality and White nationalism. This “new evidence” does not meet established scientific and ethical standards of genetics and evolutionary biol...

Resources are needed for growth, reproduction and survival, and organisms must trade-off limited resources among competing processes. Nutritional availability in organisms is sensed and monitored by nutrient-sensing pathways that can trigger physiological changes or alter gene expression. Previous studies have proposed that one such signalling path...

Macroevolution can be regarded as the result of evolutionary changes of synergistically acting genes. Unfortunately, the importance of these genes in macroevolution is difficult to assess and hence the identification of macroevolutionary key genes is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. In this study, we designed various word embedding librar...

The concept of “organism” has been central to modern biology, with its definition and philosophical implications evolving since the nineteenth century. In contemporary biology, the divide between developmental and physiological approaches and evolutionary approaches has influenced the definition of organism. The convergence between molecular biolog...

During the last few years, various authors have called for the elaboration of a theoretical framework that would better take into account the role of organisms in evolutionary dynamics. In this paper, I argue that an organism-centered evolutionary theory, which implies the rehabilitation of an organizational thinking in evolutionary biology and sho...

For most of the twentieth century, biology forgot or largely neglected organization. By this term, I mean a certain mode of interaction among the parts of a system, which is by hypothesis distinctively realized by biological systems. While a systemic trend is progressively pervading various biological fields – notably Evolutionary Biology, Systems...

Understanding why some clades diversify greatly while others do not is a major goal of evolutionary biology. Both abiotic and biotic factors are important in driving unequal morphological diversity across the tree of life. However, few studies have quantified how abiotic habitat and community composition differences influence unequal morphological...

The underpinnings of bipedal gait are reviewed from an evolutionary biology and prognostic health perspective to better understand issues and concerns related to cell phone use during ambulation and under conditions of distraction and interference. We also consider gait-related health issues associated with the fear of or risk of falling and includ...

A new computational tool provides insights into the structure of the cerebellum in mammals.

The origin of parental care is a central question in evolutionary biology, and understating the evolution of this behaviour requires quantifying benefits and costs. To address this subject, we conducted a meta-analysis on amphibians, a group in which parental care has evolved multiple times. We found that both male and female parents increase egg s...

Understanding, predicting, and controlling the phenotypic consequences of genetic and environmental change is essential to many areas of fundamental and applied biology. In evolutionary biology, the generative process of development is a major source of organismal evolvability that constrains or facilitates adaptive change by shaping the distributi...

The theories of evolution have earned a lot of respect for nature. But the construction of arguments continues both in support and against the theories. The modern research related to genetics, evolution, mutation, learning, inheritance and ecology are accumulating all possible evidences substantiated till date but seem to miss a crucial element, w...

Most species belonging to the diplomonad genera, Trepomonas and Hexamita, are considered to have secondarily adapted to free-living lifestyles from the parasitic ancestor. Here, we report the annotated transcriptome data of Trepomonas sp. NIES-1444 and Hexamita sp. NIES-1440, the analysis of which will provide insights into the lifestyle transition...

Many insects, including several orthopterans, undergo dramatic changes in body coloration during ontogeny. This variation is particularly intriguing in gomphocerine grasshoppers, where the green and brown morphs appear to be genetically determined (Schielzeth & Dieker, 2020, BMC Evolutionary Biology , 20, 63; Winter et al., 2021, Heredity , 127, 66...

Many disease-causing microbes are not obligate pathogens; rather, they are environmental microbes taking advantage of an ecological opportunity. The existence of microbes whose life cycle does not require a host and are not normally pathogenic, yet are well-suited to host exploitation, is an evolutionary puzzle. One hypothesis posits that selection...

A genetic duplication event during evolution allowed male wood tiger moths to have either yellow or white patterns on their wings.

Measuring the fitnesses of genetic variants is a fundamental objective in evolutionary biology. A standard approach for measuring microbial fitnesses in bulk involves labeling a library of genetic variants with unique sequence barcodes, competing the labeled strains in batch culture, and using deep sequencing to track changes in the barcode abundan...

The vast reserves of oil that power our modern civilization have long been a subject of intrigue and investigation. Traditionally, these reserves have been understood as products of ancient organic matter, primarily photosynthetic organisms, subjected to specific geological conditions over millions of years. Yet, as we delve deeper into the intrica...

The use of entropy related concepts goes from physics, such as in statistical mechanics, to evolutionary biology. The Shannon entropy is a measure used to quantify the amount of information in a system, and its estimation is usually made under the frequentist approach. In the present paper, we introduce an fully objective Bayesian analysis to obtai...

Colour is often used as an aposematic warning signal, with predator learning expected to lead to a single colour pattern within a population. However, there are many puzzling cases where aposematic signals are also polymorphic. The wood tiger moth, Arctia plantaginis , displays bright hindwing colours associated with unpalatability, and males have...

A key step in the evolutionary transition to multicellularity is the origin of multicellular groups as biological individuals capable of adaptation. Comparative work, supported by theory, suggests clonal development should facilitate this transition, although this hypothesis has never been tested in a single model system. We evolved 20 replicate po...

Detecting introgression between closely related populations or species is a fundamental objective in evolutionary biology. Existing methods for detecting migration and inferring migration rates from population genetic data often assume a neutral model of evolution. Growing evidence of the pervasive impact of selection on large portions of the genom...

We argue that research in the psychological sciences testing evolutionarily informed questions could benefit considerably from more frequent use of techniques common in behavior genetics. We review some of the reasons why data and analytical strategies in behavior genetics confer certain advantages over more traditional forms of data analysis. In p...

Predicting the effects of mutations on protein function is an important issue in evolutionary biology and biomedical applications. Computational approaches, ranging from graphical models to deep-learning architectures, can capture the statistical properties of sequence data and predict the outcome of high-throughput mutagenesis experiments probing...

Evolutionary economics has been useful to explain the nature of the processes of innovation, as well as providing useful heuristics for applied research. However, quantitative tests are rare and in general fail to capture the observed dynamics of firms in real markets. A main problem is how to estimate the fitnesses of companies. We present a quant...

Selfish genetic elements can promote their transmission at the expense of individual survival, creating conflict between the element and the rest of the genome. Recently, a large number of toxin-antidote (TA) post-segregation distorters have been identified in non-obligate outcrossing nematodes. Their origin and the evolutionary forces that keep th...

In modern agriculture, weed problems are predicted to worsen and become more complicated as a result of increasing invasiveness, herbicide resistance, and increased emphasis on high-input methods. Weeds cause huge economic yield losses that range from $100 million to $26 billion globally. The knowledge of weed science has offered success in the pas...

The intricate web of microbial evolution has long challenged scientists striving to decipher its complexities. Traditional methodologies, though powerful, are often constrained by vast combinatorial challenges, data incompleteness, and computational intensities. Enter the revolutionary realm of quantum computing—a paradigm that promises to drastica...

Adaptation is driven by the selection for beneficial mutations that provide a fitness advantage in the specific environment in which a population is evolving. However, environments are rarely constant or predictable. When an organism well adapted to one environment finds itself in another, pleiotropic effects of mutations that made it well adapted...

The recent discovery of the striking sheetlike multicellular choanoflagellate species Choanoeca flexa that dynamically interconverts between two hemispherical forms of opposite orientation raises fundamental questions in cell and evolutionary biology, as choanoflagellates are the closest living relatives of animals. It similarly motivates questions...

Computational genomics increasingly relies on machine learning methods for genome interpretation, and the recent adoption of neural sequence-to-function models highlights the need for rigorous model specification and controlled evaluation, problems familiar to other fields of AI. Research strategies that have greatly benefited other fields --- incl...

Juvenile undernutrition has lasting effects on adult metabolism of the affected individuals, but it is unclear how adult physiology is shaped over evolutionary time by natural selection driven by juvenile undernutrition. We combined RNAseq, targeted metabolomics and genomics to study the consequences of evolution under juvenile undernutrition for m...

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a causative agent of chytridiomycosis, is decimating amphibian populations around the world. Bd belongs to the chytrid lineage, a group of early-diverging fungi that are widely used to study fungal evolution. Like all chytrids, Bd develops from a motile form into a sessile, growth form, a transition that involve...

Understanding how demographic processes and environmental conditions affect behavioral variation across populations is pivotal in evolutionary biology. However, as strong evidence accumulates for how these factors drive differences in behavior across populations, the role that such processes play in the link between behavior and life-history traits...

Mutations are the ultimate source of genetic variation for natural selection to act upon. A major question in evolutionary biology is the extent to which new mutations can generate genetic variation under natural conditions to permit adaptive evolution over ecological time scales. Here we collected fitness data for chemically induced (ethylmethane...

Background: In bioinformatics, tools like multiple sequence alignment and entropy methods probe sequence information and evolutionary relationships between species. Although powerful, they might miss crucial hierarchical relationships formed by the reuse of repetitive subsequences like duplicons and transposable elements. Such relationships are gov...

Darwin's theory of evolution, which is based on variation, heredity, and selection, includes all biological fields and spreads to other areas such as philosophy. Medicine is an example of how the evolutionary perspective can greatly improve the understanding of concepts in an area, as human health and pathological conditions are under the effect of...

Mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) have been widely used in phylogenetic analysis and evolutionary biology. The Labeoninae is the largest subfamily of Cypriniformes and has great economic importance and ecological value. In this study, we sequenced, annotated, and characterized the complete mitogenome of Linichthys laticeps and then constructed th...

New mutations provide the raw material for evolution and adaptation. The distribution of fitness effects (DFE) describes the spectrum of effects of new mutations that can occur along a genome, and is therefore of vital interest in evolutionary biology. Recent work has uncovered striking similarities in the DFE between closely related species, promp...

In many species, meiotic recombination events tend to occur in narrow intervals of the genome, known as hotspots. In humans and mice, double strand break (DSB) hotspot locations are determined by the DNA-binding specificity of the zinc finger array of the PRDM9 protein, which is rapidly evolving at residues in contact with DNA. Previous models expl...

In this paper, we characterize a type of functional explanation that addresses why a homologous trait that originated deep in the evolutionary history of a clade is observed to have remained widespread and largely unchanged across many lineages in the clade. We argue this type of explanation is provided when evolutionary biologists attribute conser...

Inferring phylogenies among intraspecific individuals often yields unresolved relationships (i.e., polytomies). Consequently, methods that compute distance-based abstract networks, like Median-Joining Networks (MJNs), are thought to be more appropriate tools for reconstructing such relationships than traditional trees. Median-Joining Networks visua...

Sexual selection has been a popular subject within evolutionary biology because of its central role in explaining odd and counterintuitive traits found in nature. Consequently, the literature associated with this field of study became vast, with meta-analytical studies attempting to draw inferences from it. These meta-analyses have now accumulated,...

Introduction Maternal capital (MC) is a broad term from evolutionary biology, referring to any aspects of maternal phenotype that represent resources available for investment in offspring. We investigated MC in breastfeeding mothers of late preterm and early term infants, examining its relationship with infant and breastfeeding outcomes. We also de...

Experiments on tropical trees suggest that new mutations in plants are driven by age rather than number of cell divisions during growth.

Phylogenetic tree inference is a classic fundamental task in evolutionary biology that entails inferring the evolutionary relationship of targets based on multiple sequence alignment (MSA). Maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian inference (BI) methods have dominated phylogenetic tree inference for many years, but BI is too slow to handle a large numb...

Research or concepts in the biological field have often been used as a basis to root political projects of different orientations. In the libertarian literature, there have also been attempts to explore the link between the natural world and the possibility of freedom by combining discoveries in biological fields and research in philosophical/polit...

Code review increases reliability and improves reproducibility of research. As such, code review is an inevitable step in software development and is common in fields such as computer science. However, despite its importance, code review is noticeably lacking in ecology and evolutionary biology. This is problematic as it facilitates the propagation...

Recently we showed that limb movements associated with anti-parasite defenses can enhance acoustic signal attraction in male little torrent frogs ( Amolops torrentis ), which suggests a potential pathway for physical movements to become co-opted into mating displays (Zhao et al., 2022). Anderson et al. argue for alternative explanations of our resu...

Zhao et al. recently reported results which, they claim, suggest that sexual selection produces the multimodal displays seen in little torrent frogs ( Amolops torrentis ) by co-opting limb movements that originally evolved to support parasite defense (Zhao et al., 2022). Here, we explain why we believe this conclusion to be premature.

Internal fertilization requires the choreographed interaction of female cells and molecules with seminal fluid and sperm. In many animals, including insects, the female reproductive tract is physically subdivided into sections that carry out specialized functions. For example, females of many species have specialized organs for sperm storage. Droso...

Effective data visualisation is vital for data exploration, analysis and communication in research. In ecology and evolutionary biology, data are often associated with various taxonomic entities. Graphics of organisms associated with these taxa are valuable for framing results within a broader biological context. However, acquiring and using such r...

Although variation in effect sizes and predicted values among studies of similar phenomena is inevitable, such variation far exceeds what might be produced by sampling error alone. One possible explanation for variation among results is differences among researchers in the decisions they make regarding statistical analyses. A growing array of studi...

After fertilization, maternally contributed factors to the egg initiate the transition to pluripotency to give rise to embryonic stem cells, in large part by activating de novo transcription from the embryonic genome. Diverse mechanisms coordinate this transition across animals, suggesting that pervasive regulatory remodeling has shaped the earlies...

The high tree diversity in tropical forests has long been a puzzle to ecologists. In the 1970s, Janzen and Connell proposed that tree species (hosts) coexist due to the stabilizing actions of specialized enemies. This Janzen–Connell hypothesis was subsequently supported by theoretical studies. Yet, such studies have taken the presence of specialize...

In a growing digital landscape, enhancing the discoverability and resonance of scientific articles is essential. Here, we offer ten recommendations to amplify the discoverability of studies in scientific databases. Particularly, we argue that the strategic use and placement of key terms in the title, abstract, and keyword sections can boost indexin...

Same-sex sexual behaviour has attracted the attention of many scientists working in disparate areas, from sociology and psychology to behavioural and evolutionary biology. Since it does not contribute directly to reproduction, same-sex sexual behaviour is considered an evolutionary conundrum. Here, using phylogenetic analyses, we explore the evolut...

In birds, song performance determines the outcome of contests over crucial resources. We hypothesized that 1) sustained performance is limited within song, resulting in a performance decline towards the end and 2) the impact of song length is compromised if performance declines. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed the songs of 597 bird species (2...

One of the major goals of contemporary evolutionary biology is to elucidate the relative roles of allopatric and ecological differentiation and polyploidy in speciation. In this study, we address the taxonomically intricate Sabulina verna group, which has a disjunct Arctic–alpine postglacial range in Europe and occupies a broad range of ecological...

Bacterial protoplasts are known to reproduce independently of canonical molecular biological processes. Although their reproduction is thought to be influenced by environmental conditions, the growth of protoplasts in their natural habitat has never been empirically studied. Here, we studied the life cycle of protoplasts in their native environment...

Pollen identification is necessary for several subfields of geology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. However, the existing methods for pollen identification are laborious, time-consuming, and require highly skilled scientists. Therefore, there is a pressing need for an automated and accurate system for pollen identification, which can be benefic...

The large environmental impacts and enormous economic costs caused by biological invasions provide a strong impetus for managing invasion risks. Understanding the factors driving the invasion process and their consequences will raise awareness of invasions among the general public, stakeholders, and policymakers and inform effective management stra...

A central goal in evolutionary biology is to determine the predictability of adaptive genetic changes. Despite many documented cases of convergent evolution at individual loci, little is known about the repeatability of gene family expansions and contractions. To address this void, we examined gene family evolution in the redheaded pine sawfly Neod...

We investigated whether birds build nests in repeatable styles and, if so, whether styles were associated with past nest-building experience. Laboratory, captive bred zebra finches in an Experimental group were given nest-building experience, whereas, birds in a Control group were not. Each pair (n = 20) then built four nests that underwent image a...

Studies have shown that brood parasites lay their eggs early in the egg-laying sequence of their hosts, providing them with the advantage of earlier hatching. However, common cuckoos (Cuculus canorus) appear to parasitize the nests of grey bushchat (Saxicola ferreus) during the late egg-laying stage. The bushchat often abandon parasitized-nests in...

This paper introduces “Kabirian-based optinalysis (KBO),” a pioneering framework that addresses the longstanding challenges in estimating symmetry/asymmetry, similarity/dissimilarity, and identity/unidentity within mathematical structures and biological sequences. The existing methods often lack a strong theoretical foundation, leading to inconsist...

Conflict management entails preventing and repairing damages resulting from social conflicts. While previous research has emphasized post-conflict actions like reconciliation, the understanding of how primates weigh the costs and benefits of conflict remains limited. Uncovering this hidden but fundamental aspect of conflict management requires addr...

DNMT3 in Hymenoptera has a unique duplication of the essential PWWP domain. Using GST-tagged PWWP fusion proteins and histone arrays we show that these domains have gained new properties and represent the first case of PWWP domains binding to H3K27 chromatin modifications, including H3K27me3, a key modification that is important during development....

Dynamic attachment is indispensable for animals to cope with unexpected disturbances. Minor attention has been paid to the dynamic performance of insects’ adhesive pads. Through experiments pulling whole grasshoppers off a glass rod at varying speeds, surprising findings emerged. The feet did not always maintain contact but released and then reconn...

This book records almost 50 years’ worth of developing and explaining a new way of thinking about behavior. It represents a journey more than a goal. I came to see that the science of behavior needed a new paradigm, and two sorts of changes were required. First, the old molecular view inherited from the nineteenth century, based on discrete respons...

No adequate understanding of behavior is possible without evolutionary theory. Evolution due to selection is necessary to understand why behavior and organisms exist, how culture evolves, and how behavior of individual organisms develops. Evolutionary theory permits going beyond everyday folk psychology that views actions as done by an agent for re...

Predicting the outcomes of adaptation is a major goal of evolutionary biology. When temporal changes in the environment mirror spatial gradients, it opens up the potential for predicting the course of adaptive evolution over time based on patterns of spatial genetic and phenotypic variation. We assessed this approach in a 30-year transplant experim...

House mice (Mus musculus) are the ancestors of laboratory mouse strains and an excellent model for evolutionary biology. The origin, divergence and inter-subspecies hybridization of the three main subspecies (Mus musculus domesticus, M. m. musculus, M. m. castaneus) were not well-resolved. Population genomic analyses with 349 samples from Eurasia c...