The macroevolutionary consequences of island hopping

by Nathalie Feiner

Natural historians have known for a long time that islands often harbour an extraordinary amount of biodiversity. One reason is that lineages that colonize islands can exploit open ecological niches and therefore diversify along new evolutionary trajectories. So did Anolis lizards following their arrival to the Caribbean. A range of habitat specialists has evolved repeatedly on different

What can horned beetles tell us about the mechanisms of plasticity and their evolution?

by EES Media Officer

Sofia Casasa, a recent graduate student under the EES research program, is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Ragsdale lab at Indiana University. We are delighted to cross-post Dr. Casasa’s recent “behind the paper” article (from the Nature Research Ecology & Evolution Community) on her new paper “What can horned beetles tell us about the

Unraveling the evolutionary role of affordances

by Manuel Heras-Escribano

Affordances, or the possibilities for acting in our environments, are pervasive in everyday life. We are constantly surrounded by them: we perceive the floor as a walkable surface, a coffee mug is perceived as a graspable object, and doors are perceived as pass-through-able apertures, etc. For some authors, these objects of perception are, by far,

Developmental bias driving self-domestication processes and macroevolution? The case of red foxes living in urban and rural habitats

by Kevin Parsons

Darwin was particularly fascinated by changes in animals that occurred during domestication which helped to form some of his major ideas. Indeed, the Origin of Species contained a chapter on pigeons, and Darwin even bred pigeons himself to understand the processes taking place during domestication. However, despite this long-standing interest in domestication evolutionary biologists are

How to fit in: The learning principles of cell differentiation

by Miguel Brun-Usan

The logic underlying cell differentiation has motivated an intense field of debate over years. How can plastic, developing cells “know” exactly where and how to differentiate ? Given that cells are aquipped with genetic networks, could they benefit from some form of basic learning, as cognitive systems do with neural networks? In our recent paper,

Synthesising Arguments and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

by Andrew Buskell

Philosophers of science are sometimes seen by practicing scientists as useless, or unnecessary. Take scientist, writer, and broadcaster Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson recently poked fun at philosophical questions and methods, wondering whether a philosopher could ever be a “productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world.1” And many philosophers of science are familiar