Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Evolution
Reliability of meta-analyses in ecology and evolution: (mostly) good news from a case study on sexual signals
Published: 2024-11-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Meta-analyses are powerful synthesis tools that are popular in ecology and evolution owing to the rapidly growing literature of this field. Although the usefulness of meta-analyses depends on their reliability, such as the precision of individual and mean effect sizes, attempts to reproduce meta-analyses’ results remain rare in ecology and evolution. Here, we assess the reliability of 41 [...]
Evolutionarily Optimal Phage Life-History Traits
Published: 2024-11-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology
Optimal phage life-history traits are computed from data on phenotypic tradeoffs presented in De Paepe and Tadei (2006). A parameter is introduced, l_e, that describes the loss of virions in the environment. Hygienic interventions increase l_e. The optimal burst size decreases with l_e and the optimal capsid thickness increases with l_e. The optimal viral fitness also decreases with l_e. An [...]
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 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 [...]