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

Domestication and Agriculture are the Outcome of Plant Gene-Human Culture Coevolution

by Arie Altman & Alex Mesoudi

In our recent paper, “Understanding agriculture within the frameworks of cumulative cultural evolution, gene-culture coevolution and cultural niche construction” (Human Ecology 47:483–497), we apply the framework and concepts of Gene-Culture Coevolution (GCC), Niche Construction (NC) and Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) to agriculture. All three concepts were originally conceived with respect to human culture and human

Organism-Constructed Environments are Different

by Kevin Laland

I am very happy that the article Niche construction affects the variability and strength of natural selection, which I co-authored with Andrew Clark, Dominik Deffner, John Odling-Smee, & John Endler, has just been published in The American Naturalist. I’ve argued for a long time that niche construction – the modification of environments by organisms – is

Does Inheritance Need a Rethink? Conceptual Tools to Extend Inheritance beyond the DNA

by Sophie Veigl, Javier Suárez, & Adrian Stencel

Inheritance is an essential component of evolutionary processes. Without inheritance, evolution by natural selection cannot lead to the accumulation of complex, adaptive traits. But what can be inherited, and how? Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb argued in “Evolution in Four Dimensions” that in addition to genetic inheritance, evolution can also work on epigenetic,

The Evolution of Robustness

by Wim Hordijk and Lee Altenberg

In Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, the key phrase is “survival of the fittest”: those organisms that are best fit to carry out the tasks of living in their world are the ones that survive. But they won’t live forever — they must have offspring that inherit the traits that made them fit