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Category Archives: evolution
The glaciers of the last ice age left their mark on the genetic diversity of species across the globe
For the last two and a half million years or so — up until a certain species of upright-walking ape descendants really started making their presence known — the greatest force shaping Earth’s biological diversity may well have been ice. … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, insects, mammals, mutation, phylogeography, plants, population genetics
Tagged glacier, Quaternary
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Evolution 2023: Highlights of evolution and ecological genetics at Albuquerque
Evolution is back, folks. That is, the 2023 joint annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution, held last week in Albuquerque, New Mexico, felt just about like its pre-pandemic self. The … Continue reading
Four science books for 2022
The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post. Books occupy a curious place in my reading life. I read a lot as an academic biologist, from research papers to grant proposals … Continue reading
Posted in book review, ecology, evolution, natural history, politics
Tagged forest conservation, J.B.S. Haldane, paleontology, sensory biology
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Recent reading: 18 Sept 2022
Los Angeles doesn’t really get full-on summer heat until September, after months of building warmth and time elapsed since that last gasp of winter rains and spring fog. This year we (and most of the rest of the western U.S.) … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged adaptive walk, geometric theory of adaptation, GWAS, Linanthus parryae
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Recent reading: 2 Sept 2022
It’s the end of the first week of classes on my campus, after a spring and summer of more or less successful, mostly in-person conferences (more on that later, I think). I’ve got two big lecture sections of Evolutionary Biology … Continue reading
Revealing the natural history of yeast
The following is a guest post by Matthew Vandermeulen, PhD, at the University at Buffalo. Matthew studies the regulation of responses to environmental variation; he is on Twitter as @mvandermeulen. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, baker’s and brewer’s yeast, may be one organism that could contend with dogs … Continue reading
Posted in domestication, ecology, evolution, genomics, microbiology, mini-review, yeast
Tagged Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast
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Recent reading: 29 April 2022
How is this month already almost over? Four weeks ago I was just starting to realize that an unexpected, astonishingly good flowering season for Joshua trees meant I needed to shoehorn in some fieldwork, eyeing the data analysis I needed … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, genomics, horizontal gene transfer, journal club, microbiology
Tagged cuckoo, host-parasite, human diversity, rhizobia, Richard Lewontin
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Recent reading: 1 April 2022
April Fool’s Day is no one’s favorite holiday, as far as I can tell. I do remember a time when it was sort of fun to be listening to Morning Edition over breakfast and slowly realize that the totally serious-sounding … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged community genetics, landscape genetics, plant-pollinator interactions
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Recent reading: 18 March 2022
In the last fortnight, I saw one long-gestating project finally published, and got to be a small part of the publication of what’s arguably the biggest-ever study of adaptive evolution. I subjected an SUV full of students to a botany-themed … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, journal club, quantitative genetics
Tagged cowpea, diversity in STEM, g matrix, Ipomoea hederacea, symbiosis
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Recent reading: 4 March 2022
It’s now two weeks since I resumed in-person teaching, and so far, so good. It’s shockingly refreshing to actually interact with students directly, even with everyone masked, and to be able to just improvise with a specimen picked up on … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged milkweed, monarch butterflies, Muller's ratchet, mutualism, Red Queen, STRUCTURE
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