Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Evolution
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 primates through diverse climates
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
One of the most influential hypotheses about primate evolution postulates that their origin, radiation, and major dispersals were associated with exceptionally warm conditions in tropical forests at northern latitudes (henceforth the warm tropical forest hypothesis). However, this notion has proven difficult to test given the overall uncertainty about both geographic locations and paleoclimates [...]
Not by selection alone: expanding the scope of gene-culture coevolution
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) - an ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences - is often used to explain the evolution of key human traits. Despite the framework’s broad conceptual appeal however, empirical evidence is often perceived as limited to a few key examples like lactase persistence. We argue this apparent gap between theoretical appeal and empirical evidence stems [...]
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 suggest that analogous problems have been successfully addressed in other disciplines using what has been recently termed simulation-based [...]
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, “path length”, that honestly signals male fitness and is therefore preferred by all females. However, their data and analyses provide no statistical support for this claim. (1) The key finding — that long-path songs are difficult to learn (Fig. 4c) — is a statistical artefact: regressing y minus x on x creates an illusory effect where none [...]
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 defense plays a crucial role in shaping ecosystems through selection for toxin resistance and has evolved convergently across multiple lineages. Research on toxin resistance has been pivotal in understanding trait evolution, as it often evolves through a simple genetic mechanism, target-site resistance (TSR), where mutations in target genes confer resistance. However, in tropical [...]
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 relationships, phylogenetic conflict continues to be reported, and often attributed to genome duplication, reticulation, incomplete lineage sorting or rapid [...]
Is the audience gender-blind? Smaller attendance in female talks highlights imbalanced visibility in academia
Published: 2024-05-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Evolution, Gender Equity in Education, Higher Education, Inequality and Stratification, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychological Phenomena and Processes
Although diverse perspectives are fundamental for fostering and advancing science, power relations have limited the development, propagation of ideas, and recognition of political minority groups in academia. Gender bias is one of the most well-documented processes leading women to drop out of their academic careers due to fewer opportunities and lower recognition. Using decadal-scale data on [...]
A Gene-Culture Co-Evolutionary Perspective on the Puzzle of Human Twinship
Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Evolution, Maternal and Child Health, Population Biology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Natural selection should favor litter sizes that optimize trade-offs between brood-size and offspring viability. Across the primate order, modal litter size is one, suggesting a deep history of selection favoring minimal litters. Humans, however---despite having the longest juvenile period and slowest life-history of all primates---still produce twin-births at appreciable rates, even though such [...]