Category Archives: natural selection

@NothingInBio at #Evol2013: What we’re presenting

by Yoder

Cecret Lake - Alta Utah

The Evolution 2013 meetings are nearly upon us, and most of the team here at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! are going to be in Snowbird, Utah for the joint annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Society for the Study of Evolution. Rather than make you hunt through the online program, here’s where we’ll be, and what we’re presenting:

  • Amy will present “The population genetics of rapidly evolving reproductive genes: How much variation should we expect to find?” on Sunday at 9:30, as part of the Evolutionary Genetics and/or Genomics section in Cotton D/Snowbird Center. [program link]
  • Look for some of CJ’s work in a lightning talk by her dissertation advisor, Mark Dybdahl, titled “Identifying the molecular basis of coevolution: merging models and mechanisms” on Monday at 11:45, in Superior B/Cliff Lodge. [program link]
  • Noah will present “What can we learn from sequence-based species discovery? An example using sky island fly communities” on Tuesday at 9:30, as part of the Community Ecology and Evolution section in Peruvian A/Snowbird Center. [program link]
  • Sarah will present “Nature, nurture and the gut microbiota in the brood parasitic Brown-headed Cowbird” on Tuesday at 10:30, as part of the Community Ecology and Evolution section in Peruvian A/Snowbird Center. [program link]
  • Jeremy will present “Evidence for recent adaptation in genome regions associated with ecological traits in Medicago truncatula” on Tuesday at 2:45, as part of the Genetics of Adaptation section in Rendezvous A/Snowbird Center. [program link]

Looks like we’re in for a busy Tuesday! But this year, you won’t have to choose between us.

The beef I have with The Paleo Diet

by Hird

I’ve heard a lot about “The Paleo Diet” lately and every time a popular news source (say NPR or ABC or Fox News or New York Times) does a piece, I cringe a little bit. For those of you who have never heard of the Paleo Diet (from Wikipedia):

The paleolithic diet…is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals that various hominid species habitually consumed during the Paleolithic era—a period of about 2.5 million years duration that ended around 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture.

So that’s the basic idea – people restricting their diet to things that we ate before modern agriculture. I don’t really have a problem with the diet, per se – removing highly processed foods and increasing your activity level is a good idea for almost anyone. But the rationale that always accompanies the diet – that’s where the cringe comes in.
The rationale goes like this (again from Wikipedia):

Paleolithic nutrition is based on the premise that modern humans are genetically adapted to the diet of their Paleolithic ancestors and that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture, and therefore that an ideal diet for human health and well-being is one that resembles this ancestral diet.

I can break this rationale down into three assumptions/statements:
1. Evolution acts to optimize health.
2. Evolution adapted us to eat a specific diet.
3. Therefore, today, we should eat that diet to optimize our health.

As an evolutionary biologist, I think there are logical and scientific flaws to each of these statements.

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Is corn the new milk? Evolutionarily speaking, that is.

by Yoder

Cross-posted from Denim and Tweed.

ResearchBlogging.orgIt is a widespread misconception that, as we developed the technology to reshape our environment to our preferences, human beings neutralized the power of natural selection. Quite the opposite is true: some of the best-known examples of recent evolutionary change in humans are attributable to technology. People who colonized high-altitude environments were selected for tolerance of low-oxygen conditions in the high Himalayas and Andes; populations that have historically raised cattle for milk evolved the ability to digest milk sugars as adults.

A recent study of population genetics in Native American groups suggests that another example is ripening in the experimental fields just a few blocks away from my office at the University of Minnesota: Corn, or maize, may have exerted natural selection on the human populations that first cultivated it.

The target of this new study is an allele called 230Cys, a variant of a gene involved in transporting cholesterol. 230Cys is known only in Native American populations, and it’s associated with abnormally low production of HDL cholesterol (that’s the “good” kind of cholesterol) and thereby increased risk for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. In Native American populations, the genetic code near 230Cys shows the reduced diversity associated with a selective sweep, which suggests that, although it’s not particuarly helpful now, this variant may have been favored by selection in the past.

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#Evol2012: Puffin poop and predation pressures

by Yoder

Puffin

A final few propitious presentations from the Evolution meetings in Ottawa:

Kirsten Bowser is running puffin faeces through next-generation sequencing to identify what the adorable seabirds eat—and she’s already found some prey species that wouldn’t be easily identified just by watching what puffins bring back to their nests.

Brian Counterman showed that hybridization between subspecies of the South American butterlfy Heliconius erato with different wing patterns can transfer wing patterning between subspecies—mostly by transferring a single chunk of DNA that doesn’t code for any protein, but performs a regulatory function. What’s more, the same region is being moved between multiple pairs of hybridizing H. erato subspecies.

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Evolving invaders

by Yoder

This post is a guest contribution by Kathryn Turner, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, who studies the evolution of invasive thistles. Kathryn writes about her scientific interests at the slyly named site Alien Plantation and tweets under the handle @KTInvasion.

ResearchBlogging.orgInvasive species are a big problem. A real big problem. In the US alone, invasive species cost nearly $120 billion in damages per year (Pimentel 2005). 42% of species on the Threatened and Endangered list are there primarily because of invasive species.

Which leaves us with two questions. First, most obviously, how is it that a species is able to come into a new environment that it is not adapted to, surrounded by new environmental conditions and foreign biological interactions, and thrive? Thrive so exaggeratedly, that it can out-compete and displace species which have been there for millennia, adapting precisely to those environmental conditions and biological interactions? How can an individual survive to propagate a population? How can any species accomplish this? Second, less obviously: why can’t more species do it? Humans transport animals and seeds (and spores and larvae, etc, etc) around all the time, but only 10% establish self-sustaining populations, and only 1% spread to new habitats, becoming potentially invasive; this is known as the ‘tens rule’ (Williamson 1993) – a funny ‘rule of thumb’ for which I could never quite figure out the math.

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Ecological complexity breeds evolutionary complication

by Yoder


ResearchBlogging.orgIt is a truth universally acknowledged in evolutionary biology, that one species interacting with another species, must be having some effect on that other species’ evolution.

Actually, that’s not really true. Biologists generally agree that predators, prey, parasites, and competitors can exert natural selection on the other species they encounter, but we’re still not sure how much those interactions matter over millions of years of evolutionary history.

On the one hand, groups of species that are engaged in tight coevolutionary relationships are also very diverse, which could mean that coevolution causes diversity. But it could be that the other way around: diversity could create coevolutionary specificity, if larger groups of closely-related species are forced into narower interactions to avoid competing with each other.

Part of the problem is that it’s hard to study a species evolving over time without interacting with any other species—how can we identify the effect of coevolution if we can’t see what happens in its absence? If only we could force some critters to evolve with and without other critters, and compare the results after many generations …

Oh, wait. That is totally possible. And the results have just been published.

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Do choosy cuckoos choose well-matched hosts?

by Yoder

A reed warbler feeds a cuckoo chick

Brood parasitism, the reproductive strategy of choice for cuckoos and cowbirds, sounds like a lazy approach to parenting: lay your eggs in another bird’s nest, and let the unwilling adoptive parents take the trouble to raise your chicks. But contracting out parental care like this comes with many of its own complications. Chicks raised by parents of a different species have to eliminate competition from their adoptive nestmates, and may grow up a bit confused; reluctant host birds may need to be told, and reminded, that raising cuckoo chicks is an offer they can’t refuse.

ResearchBlogging.orgBut before crossing all those hurdles, a brood parasite’s first task is to lay eggs in the nest of a host who won’t immediately recognize and reject them. The strong natural selection imposed by host rejection has led cuckoos to evolve “host races” that lay eggs whose color and spotting pattern matched to those of their preferred host species. This kind of broad-scale pattern could arise without much direct effort by female cuckoos—those who lay eggs in the nest of the best matching host species would simply be the ones most likely to have chicks that survive to the next generation. But is it possible that cuckoos do take an active role in matching up to their hosts, seeking out host nests containing eggs that look like their own?

The answer, according to a series of studies over the last several years, is yes—probably.

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Happy Darwin Day!

by Yoder

Charles Darwin

Cross-posted from Denim and Tweed.

Charles Darwin, who first proposed that natural selection could be responsible for “descent with modification,” the observation (which predates Darwin) that living species change over time and give rise to new species, was born on this day in 1809.

By all accounts, Darwin was a geek’s geek—uncomfortable in high-pressure social situations and devoted to the fiddly details of his scientific work. But he also seems to have been a quietly friendly chap, keeping up a tremendous volume of correspondence with other scientists all over the world, and, most charmingly, bringing his children into the fun of puzzle-solving that lies at the heart of science.

I don’t know of better proof of this than this account of Darwin’s familial experimentation, produced for NPR by Robert Krulwich with writer David Quamman, a couple years back around the Darwin Bicentary. (Thanks to Madhusudan Katti for reminding me about it!)


http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=6105541&m=6105662&t=audio

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