Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Evolution
Spatial connectivity through mountains and deserts drove South American scorpion's dispersal
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
We inferred the geographic dispersal routes and the environmental conditions that shaped the ~30-million-years historical biogeography of Brachistosternus scorpions in South America. We evaluated the role that altitude and aridity had on the geographic distance that each species dispersed from the location of the genus common ancestor. Based on previous studies, we evaluated the hypothesis [...]
Demographic expansion and panmixia in a St. Martin endemic, Anolis pogus, coincides with the decline of a competitor
Published: 2024-09-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Population Biology, Zoology
Understanding patterns of differentiation at microgeographic scales can enhance our understanding of evolutionary dynamics and lead to the development of effective conservation strategies. In particular, high levels of landscape heterogeneity can strongly influence species abundances, genetic structure, and demographic trends. The bearded anole, Anolis pogus, is endemic to the topographically [...]
On the Origin of Nightjars (Caprimulgidae): Perspectives from the Fossil Record
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology
Fossils represent the only direct evidence for the ancestral morphologies, antiquity, and historical geographic distributions of life on Earth. The fossil record of the avian clade Strisores (which includes nightjars, oilbirds, potoos, frogmouths, owlet-nightjars, treeswifts, swifts, and hummingbirds) has been richly documented by avian standards, with well-corroborated stem-group representatives [...]
The radiation and geographic expansion of euprimates through diverse climates
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The most influential hypothesis about euprimate evolution postulates that their origin, radiation, and major dispersals, were associated with the exceptional warmer conditions of the planet in the tropical forests of higher latitudes. However, this notion has proven difficult to test given the overall uncertainty about the geographic locations and palaeoclimates of ancestral species. By the [...]
Gene-culture coevolution: A broader evolutionary perspective
Published: 2024-09-05
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Gene-culture coevolution (GCC) stands out among approaches to human evolution for its ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences. Combining insights from cultural evolution and human genetics, it has been invoked to explain the evolution of many "species-defining" human traits, from language to large-scale cooperation. However, despite its broad conceptual appeal, empirical evidence [...]
Why did the human brain size evolve? A way forward
Published: 2024-08-28
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Evolution
Why the human brain size evolved has been a major evolutionary puzzle since Darwin but addressing it has been challenging. A key reason is the lack of research tools to infer the causes of a unique event for which experiments are not possible. We describe how the analogous problem of why there is day and night has been successfully addressed in physics and learning from that experience, we [...]
No support for honest signalling of male quality in zebra finch song
Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Alam et al.1 claim to have discovered a song feature, called “path length”, that honestly signals male fitness and is therefore preferred by all females. We see no statistical support for this claim in the original data. (1) The main finding about path length being an honest signal of quality (Fig. 4c) results from a statistical artefact, the regression of y minus x over x, which creates an [...]
Three Paths Through the Levels of Selection
Published: 2024-08-08
Subjects: Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Statistical Models, Zoology
Evolutionary rescue by aneuploidy in tumors exposed to anti-cancer drugs
Published: 2024-07-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Life Sciences
Evolutionary rescue happens when a population survives a sudden environmental change that initially causes the population to decline toward extinction. A prime example of evolutionary rescue is the ability of cancer to survive exposure to treatment. One evolutionary mechanism by which a population of cancer cells can adapt to chemotherapy is aneuploidy. Aneuploid cancer cells can be fitter in an [...]
The impact of tip age distribution on reconstructing trait evolution using phylogenetic comparative methods
Published: 2024-07-27
Subjects: Evolution
Collecting data for use in constructing phylogenies is a valuable but time- and resource-consuming pursuit. As a result, indicators of the potential value of including certain species in a phylogeny a priori could prove useful when planning this stage of research. Here, we used a simulation approach to investigate whether there are trends in the ability for phylogenetic comparative methods to [...]
Snakes (Erythrolamprus spp.) with a complex toxic diet show convergent yet highly heterogeneous voltage-gated sodium channel evolution
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Chemical defenses shape ecosystems by orchestrating interactions between species and promoting specialization on toxic prey. Many toxins exist in highly biodiverse tropical ecosystems, sometimes in the same prey, imposing challenges for studying toxin resistance and requiring the development of new models. Royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus) play a significant but understudied role as predators [...]
Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation and selection
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While many evolutionary studies assume that random mutations produce isotropic phenotypic variation, the distribution of variation available to natural selection is more restricted, as the distribution of phenotypic variation is affected by a range of factors in [...]
Ancestral state reconstruction of phenotypic characters
Published: 2024-07-09
Subjects: Evolution
Ancestral state reconstruction is a phylogenetic comparative method that involves estimating the unknown trait values of hypothetical ancestral taxa at internal nodes of a phylogenetic tree. Ancestral state reconstruction has long been, and continues to remain, among the most popular analyses in phylogenetic comparative research. In this review, I illustrate the theory and practice of ancestral [...]
Social ageing varies within a population of bottlenose whales
Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
How social behaviour changes as individuals age has important consequences for the health and function of both human and non-human societies. However, the extent of inter-individual variation in social ageing has been underappreciated, especially in natural populations of animals. Here, we leverage a photo-identification dataset spanning 35 years to examine social ageing in an Endangered [...]
Navigating phylogenetic conflict and evolutionary inference in plants with target capture data
Published: 2024-05-27
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Target capture has quickly become a preferred approach for plant systematic and evolutionary research, marking a step-change in the generation of data for phylogenetic inference. While this advancement has facilitated the resolution of many phylogenetic relationships, phylogenetic conflict continues to be reported, and often attributed to genome duplication, reticulation, deep coalescence or [...]