Category Archives: evolution

What do we know about the genetics of “born this way?” — and how does it help us to know it?

Not quite five years ago, a collaboration led by researchers at the Broad Institute published what seemed like the last word in “born this way”: a genomic study of same-sex sexual behavior in a cohort of almost half a million … Continue reading

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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