Due to the industrialization of agriculture, medicine, and landscape, humans have become the world’s greatest evolutionary force especially towards disease organisms, agricultural pests, commensals, and species hunted commercially. For example, nearly all Gram-positive infections were sensitive to penicillin in the 1940s but currently the majority of Gram-positive bacteria are penicillin-resistant and up to 50% are [...]
Population evolutionary psychology provides broad claims about human nature and culture for popular consumption. Just as natural selection has caused morphological adaptations, Pop EP has allowed for universal human nature adaptations such as face recognition, parental care, and mate attraction and retention. However, there are many faults within population EP. The largest fallacy is a [...]
The inclusive fitness theory, formalized by Hamilton as the inequality R>c/b, explains that cooperation is favored by natural selection if relatedness is greater than the cost to benefit ratio. R is the relatedness parameter and is expressed as the fraction of genes shared between the altruist and the recipient due to their common descent. This [...]
Andrade’s article was fascinating! She explained a theory behind cannibalism as a favored sexual selection trait in male redback spiders. Andrade provided two main points that support sexual cannibalism: increased paternity and decreased likelihood of female remating. Males that were cannibalized spent a median of 25 minutes in copulation while males that survived spent [...]
The biological species concept (BSC) offers a definition for species that is applicable to most situations and widely accepted. BSC defines a species as members of populations that actually or potentially interbreed in nature, not according to similarity of appearance. This definition emphasizes cladogenetic processes; however, it is difficult to actually apply. BSC requires measuring [...]
Nicholas Barton and Peter Keightley, authors of “Understanding Quantitative Genetic Variation”, explain the current and potential use of identifying quantitative trait loci (QTL)—portions of DNA that cause trait variation. Typically, QTLs underlie continuous traits such as height or body weight. In addition, many QTLs are associated with a single trait as many genes usually determine [...]
I am interested in combining evolution and medicine. I would like to research toxic snail venoms in search for potential pharmaceutical drugs. Determining which neurotoxins in the venom affect certain receptors will allow the venom to act in isolation and produce a specific reaction on the body’s systems without side effects. I plan to research [...]
Gould and Lewontin described adaptationism as, “An attempt to explain the existence and the particular forms of any phenotypic trait as the result of natural selection.” In other words adaptationism is the belief that natural selection is the only important method of evolution while spandrels are phenotypic characteristics that did not originate by the direct [...]
Richard Dawkins, author of The Ancestor’s Tale, agrees with Tomoko Ohta’s nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution where one can predict a relationship between population size and the rate of molecular evolution. Small animals with short generation times tend to have large populations. While large animals with large generation times tend to have small populations. [...]
Evo-devo is a field of biology comparing the developmental processes of different organisms to discover the evolutionary relationship between them and to further understand how the developmental processes evolved within the organisms. An evolutionary biologist can discover vital patterns from using an evo-devo conceptual framework. Understanding that the same master genes are found in fundamental [...]