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In Fisher's model of sexual selection, a female preference for a male trait spreads together with the trait because their genetic bases become correlated. This can be interpreted as a “greenbeard” system: a preference gene, by inducing a female to mate with a trait‐bearing male, favors itself because the male is disproportionately likely also to carry the preference gene. Here, we use this logic to...
Hybrid zones provide insights into the evolution of reproductive isolation. Sexual selection can contribute to the evolution of reproductive barriers, but it remains poorly understood how sexual traits impact gene flow in secondary contact. Here, we show that a recently evolved suite of sexual traits that function in male‐male competition mediates gene flow between two lineages of wall lizards (Podarcis muralis...
Humans have, and continue to, dramatically influence the life history of many taxa. Identification of traits that allow taxa to tolerate humans and urban environments is important for informed conservation policy. Winchell et al. (2020) uses a phylogenetic comparative framework to identify such traits in the Caribbean clade of Anolis lizards. They provide an example of how to use disparate data sources...
Landscape genomics studies focus on identifying candidate genes under selection via spatial variation in abiotic environmental variables, but rarely by biotic factors (i.e., disease). The Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) is found only on the environmentally heterogeneous island of Tasmania and is threatened with extinction by a transmissible cancer, devil facial tumor disease (DFTD). Devils...
Female mate preference for males displaying costly traits is a puzzling phenomenon found in nature. Fisher was the first to propose a formal model describing this paradoxical system of sexual selection. Despite the many models constructed from his theory, much remains unknown about its mechanics, especially in different genetic settings. Through simulations, Veller et al. compared population dynamics...
Innovations in foraging behavior can drive morphological diversity by opening up new ways of interacting with the environment, or limit diversity through functional constraints associated with different foraging behaviors. Several classic examples of adaptive radiations in birds show increased variation in ecologically relevant traits. However, these cases primarily focus on geographically narrow...
Male genitalia are among the most phenotypically diverse morphological traits, and sexual selection is widely accepted as being responsible for their evolutionary divergence. Studies of house mice suggest that the shape of the baculum (penis bone) affects male reproductive fitness and experimentally imposed postmating sexual selection has been shown to drive divergence in baculum shape across generations...
In temperate climates, the recurring seasonal exigencies of winter represent a fundamental physiological challenge for a wide range of organisms. In response, many temperate insects enter diapause, an alternative developmental program, including developmental arrest, that allows organisms to synchronize their life cycle with seasonal environmental variation. Geographic variation in diapause phenology...
A growing number of empirical studies have quantified the degree to which evolution is geometrically parallel by estimating and interpreting pairwise angles between multiple replicate lineages’ evolutionary change vectors in multivariate trait space. Similar comparisons, of distance in trait space, are used to assess the degree of convergence. These approaches amount to element‐by‐element interpretation...
Accurately estimating genetic variance components is important for studying evolution in the wild. Empirical work on domesticated and wild outbred populations suggests that dominance genetic variance represents a substantial part of genetic variance, and theoretical work predicts that ignoring dominance can inflate estimates of additive genetic variance. Whether this issue is pervasive in natural...
Evolution should render individuals resistant to stress and particularly to stress experienced by ancestors. However, many studies report negative effects of stress experienced by one generation on the performance of subsequent generations. To assess the strength of such transgenerational effects we propose a strategy aimed at overcoming the problem of type I errors when testing multiple proxies of...
When divergent populations are connected by gene flow, the establishment of complete reproductive isolation usually requires the joint action of multiple barrier effects. One example where multiple barrier effects are coupled consists of a single trait that is under divergent natural selection and also mediates assortative mating. Such multiple‐effect traits can strongly reduce gene flow. However,...
The adaptation of populations to changing conditions may be affected by interactions between individuals. For example, when cooperative interactions increase fecundity, they may allow populations to maintain high densities and thus keep track of moving environmental optima. Simultaneously, changes in population density alter the marginal benefits of cooperative investments, creating a feedback loop...
Group selection models combine selection pressure at the individual level with selection pressure at the group level. Cooperation can be costly for individuals, but beneficial for the group, and therefore, if individuals are sufficiently much assorted, and cooperators find themselves in groups with disproportionately many other cooperators, cooperation can evolve. The existing literature on group...
Inbreeding depression resulting from partially recessive deleterious alleles is thought to be the main genetic factor preventing self‐fertilizing mutants from spreading in outcrossing hermaphroditic populations. However, deleterious alleles may also generate an advantage to selfers in terms of more efficient purging, while the effects of epistasis among those alleles on inbreeding depression and mating...
The study of hybrid zones can provide insight into the genetic basis of species differences that are relevant for the maintenance of reproductive isolation. Hybrid zones can also provide insight into climate change, species distributions, and evolution. The hybrid zone between black‐capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) and Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis) is shifting northward in response...
Many developmental traits that are critical to the survival of the organism are also robust. These robust traits are resistant to phenotypic change in the face of variation. This presents a challenge to evolution. In this article, we asked whether and how a well‐established robust trait, Drosophila segment patterning, changed over the evolutionary history of the genus. We compared segment position...
A classic hypothesis posits that lineages exhibiting long‐term stasis are broadly adapted generalists that remain well‐adapted despite environmental change. However, lacking constraints that steepen adaptive peaks and stabilize the optimum, generalists’ phenotypes might drift around a broad adaptive plateau. We propose that stasis would be likely for morphological specialists that behave as ecological...
Maternal effects, either environmental or genetic in origin, are an underappreciated source of phenotypic variance in natural populations. Maternal genetic effects have the potential to constrain or enhance the evolution of offspring traits depending on their magnitude and their genetic correlation with direct genetic effects. We estimated the maternal effect variance and its genetic component for...
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