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Speciation Caused by a Single Mutation
2009-06-16 16:16:00 n ScienceNOW, On the Road to a New Species, a fantastic illumination of allopatric speciation being correlated to a single point mutation: The late Ernst Mayr, a famous Harvard University evolutionary biologist, was the first to notice the speciation potential of flycatcher birds in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands. During the 1940s, he described differences in ...
By: Migrations
Autoimmunity as a mechanism for Sympatric Speciation [Pure Pedantry]
2007-09-04 11:19:00 The issue of sympatric speciation — or how to separate species emerge from a single species without geographic isolation — is a contentious issue in evolutionary biology. How can two species emerge without reproductive isolation of two separate groups? Wouldn’t they all just breed together, hiding any new genes in heterozygotes? Bomblies et al. publishing in PLoS Bio have something interesting to say about that. The use a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana or thale grass to show that the answer might be in genes that regulate the immune response. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post… Original post by http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/-ScienceblogsCombinedFeed/~3/152-047422/autoimmunity_as_a_mechan-ism_fo.php
Hasn?t Speciation been observed experimentally?
2007-06-21 04:14:00 A reader recommended that I check out alternativescience.com. In my view, the author is a prolific writer, but out to lunch. For example: Survival of the fittest means “the reproductive success of the reproductively successful.” The central proposition of the Darwinian argument turns out to be an empty tautology. - altsci I’ll ignore the fact that ...
Color Pattern Spurs Speciation In Tropical Fish
2007-06-15 06:50:00 A team of researchers from McGill University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) has provided the first example of how colour patterns on a coral reef fish species can drive its evolution into many distinct species।“These fish were the unusual suspects for a model explanation of how new species arise,” said lead author Oscar Puebla, a PhD student in the Neotropical Environment Option (NEO), a collaboration between McGill and STRI. “When investigating ecological speciation, the first reflex is to look at the species’ environmental conditions rather than at its behavioural traits.”The researchers looked at feeding and mating behaviours based on colour patterns to explain the emergence of several species of hamlet fish (genus Hypoplectrus). Predatory Hypoplectrus fish were observed tracking other non-predatory fish species with similar colour patterns to surprise their prey, which are usually not afraid of non-predatory fish species.They were also observe... |
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