Adaptation through niche construction and microbiome function in Onthophagus beetles
…10.1111/een.12703 Diplogastrellus nematodes are sexually transmitted mutualists that alter the bacterial and fungal communities of their beetle host. [download PDF] Ledón-Rettig CC, Moczek AP, Ragsdale EJ. 2018. PNAS DOI:…
read moreWhat animal social learning can teach evolutionary biology
…by ourselves, Marcus Feldman and Francisco Ayala, was a striking testament to how far the study of animal culture has come in recent decades and the truly remarkable set of…
read moreThe variational ratchet: Intuiting the variational approach to niche construction
…Ross Ashby, for whom modeling and inference were necessary attributes of living, self-organized systems enduring over time. Put another way, organisms must increase the complementarity of the probability distribution…
read moreThe role of developmental plasticity in innovation and diversification of Onthophagus beetles
…programming mitigate the transgenerational effects of temperature in dung beetles. [download PDF] Macagno ALM, Zattara EE, Ezeakudo O, Moczek AP, Ledón‐Rettig CC. 2018. Oikos DOI: 10.1111/oik.05215. The role of…
read moreWho’s afraid of the Extended Synthesis?
…from the John Templeton Foundation, which Welch claims “is committed to using science to reveal underlying purpose, and rejecting what Nagel [a philosopher, not a supporter of the EES] calls…
read moreDomestication as a model system for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
…Wund’s4 call for a gold standard ‘single system’ combining multiple interacting constructive processes and inheritance systems that can be used to comprehend complex evolutionary processes. Moreover, the increasingly robust archaeological,…
read moreA TVOL interview with Tobias Uller: Orchestrating the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis project
…in the direction of selection, which is proof of heritability. In complex systems terms, we were selecting ecosystems based on two properties: 1) the phenotypic properties that were being selected,…
read moreThe “Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink?” Debate: A Backstory
…Society, 127(4): 707–721 https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blz064 Whitehead H et al. 2019. The reach of gene-culture coevolution in animals. Nature Comms 10: 2405 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10293-y New book coming soon (October 1st): …
read moreWhat functional ectopic compound eyes can teach us about the role of context in development and evolution
…here: Zattara EE, Macagno ALM, Busey HA, Moczek AP. 2017. Development of functional ectopic compound eyes in scarabaeid beetles by knockdown of orthodenticle. Proc Natl Acad Sci DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1714895114. [pdf]…
read moreUnderstanding the role of plasticity in evolution
…organisms better or worse at evolving new solutions, investigate which mechanisms underlie adaptive change, and predict what signatures of plasticity-led adaptation could look like in real organisms. It is…
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