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Tag Archives: natural selection
Don’t ask “When is it coevolution?” — ask “How is it coevolution?”
Ask me to pick a single word that describes what I study, and I’ll typically say “coevolution.” This is probably true of most evolutionary biologists who study interactions between species — plants and pollinators, hosts and symbionts, predators and prey, et … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Coevolution, ecology, evolution, mini-review
Tagged disease ecology, herbivory, mutualism, natural selection, parasitism, symbiosis
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Just So Stories addendum: How the stickleback keeps getting its stickles
Model organisms have been essential tools for genetics research since the field was formed. Kelle Freel discussed the characteristics that make for a good model organism in a previous TME post. Briefly, traits like short generation time, lots of offspring, … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, natural history, selection, stickleback
Tagged adaptation, gene flow, natural selection, selection, stickleback
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This new review explains why soft sweeps are the bane — and the baseline — of ecological genetics
If you’ve done ecological genetics research in the last decade, you’ve almost certainly cited a series of papers by Pleuni Pennings and Joachim Hermisson, which broke down the problem of soft selective sweeps. Pennings and Hermisson have revisited soft sweeps … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics
Tagged haplotype diversity, natural selection, soft sweeps
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Shared patterns of genomic diversity across populations of distantly related taxa
Genomic diversity is shaped by the complex interplay between the effects of genetic drift and natural selection among populations. Several of these effects, especially those of linked selection at neutral sites, adaptive introgression, and barriers to migration (often called “genomic … Continue reading
Music to an amniote's ears, an "accordion" model of genome size evolution
How did we get where we are? Genetically speaking, that is. A few posts ago, that whole genotype-phenotype question was discussed, how do genomes make plants and animals (and don’t forget the microbes!) look and act how they do. Another … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, evolution, genomics
Tagged adaptation, amniote evolution, natural selection, transposable elements
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Divergence and Linked Background Selection
We have widely discussed the reduction in neutral diversity due to demography and linked selection effects (e.g. selective sweeps and hitchhiking, or background selection) in several previous posts (e.g see here, here, and here). However, how linked selection affects neutral divergence … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, genomics, methods, selection, speciation, theory
Tagged ecological speciation, Evolution, genomics, Homo sapiens, natural selection, population genetics
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Ice-Age Euro-trips
Recent works that attempt to get at human migrations inside Europe paint a complex portrait of migratory events, admixture with archaic hominids, and adaptive evolution to new geographies, and a changing global climate. Analyzing whole genomes of 51 ancient humans … Continue reading
What does the island fox say?
Small populations are characterized by large drift and reduced efficacy of selection effects, which result in fixation of both advantageous and deleterious alleles, accumulation of homozygosity, and often reduction in population fitness. What with plummeting mammal populations across biota, understanding … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, mutation, natural history, population genetics, selection
Tagged Evolution, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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Sweeps and Demographic Inference
Population genetics presents us with numerous conundrums – several of which have to do with how the same genomic disposition can be “reached” over evolutionary time with multiple alternate demographic or selective processes. I have discussed several of these issues … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, population genetics, selection, theory
Tagged gene flow, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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