Little Evolution, BIG Evolution: Rethinking the History of Darwinism, Population Genetics, and the “Synthesis”

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-229
Author(s):  
Mark B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
History Of

Developmental biology and human evolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. e2
Author(s):  
Jeffrey H. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Population Genetics ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Molecular Change ◽  
Human Fossil ◽  
Evolutionary Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Organismal Development ◽  
Taxic Diversity

The Evolutionary or Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (here identified as the Synthesis) has been portrayed as providing the foundation for uniting a supposed disarray of biological disciplines through the lens of Darwinism fused with population genetics. Rarely acknowledged is that the Synthesis’s success was also largely due to its architects’ effectiveness in submerging British and German attempts at a synthesis by uniting the biological sciences through shared evolutionary concerns. Dobzhansky and Mayr imposed their bias toward population genetics, population (as supposedly opposed to typological) thinking, and Morgan’s conception of specific genes for specific features (here abbreviated as genes for) on human evolutionary studies. Dobzhansky declared that culture buffered humans from the whims of selection. Mayr argued that as variable as humans are now, their extinct relatives were even more variable; thus the human fossil did not present taxic diversity and all known fossils could be assembled into a gradually changing lineage of time-successive species. When Washburn centralized these biases in the new physical anthropology the fate of paleoanthropology as a non-contributor to evolutionary theory was sealed. Molecular anthropology followed suit in embracing Zuckerkandl and Pauling’s assumption that molecular change was gradual and perhaps more importantly continual. Lost in translation was and still is an appreciation of organismal development. Here I will summarize the history of these ideas and their alternatives in order to demonstrate assumptions that still need to be addressed before human evolutionary studies can more fully participate in what is a paradigm shift-in-the-making in evolutionary biology.

scholarly journals Comparative population genetics and evolutionary history of two commonly misidentified billfishes of management and conservation concern

BMC Genetics ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea M Bernard ◽  
Mahmood S Shivji ◽  
Eric D Prince ◽  
Fabio HV Hazin ◽  
Freddy Arocha ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conservation Concern ◽  
Management And Conservation ◽  
Comparative Population

scholarly journals Psidium guajava in the Galapagos Islands: population genetics and history of an invasive species

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Urquía ◽  
Bernardo Gutiérrez ◽  
Gabriela Pozo ◽  
María José Pozo ◽  
Analía Espín ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Invasive Plant ◽  
Psidium Guajava ◽  
Galapagos Islands ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Galápagos Islands ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
Island Populations ◽  
Galapagos Archipelago ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe threat of invasive plant species in island populations prompts the need to better understand their population genetics and dynamics. In the Galapagos islands, this is exemplified by the introduced guava (Psidium guajava), considered one of the greatest threats to the local biodiversity due to its effective spread in the archipelago and its ability to outcompete endemic species. To better understand its history and genetics, we analyzed individuals from three inhabited islands in the Galapagos archipelago with 11 SSR markers. Our results reveal similar genetic diversity between islands, suggestive of gene flow between them. Populations appear to be distinct between the islands of San Cristobal and Isabela, with the population of Santa Cruz being composed as a mixture from both. Additional evidence for genetic bottlenecks and the inference of introduction events suggests an original introduction of the species in San Cristobal, from where it was later introduced to Isabela, and finally into Santa Cruz. Alternatively, an independent introduction event for Isabela is also possible. These results are contrasted with the historical record, providing a first overview of the history of P. guajava in the Galapagos islands and its current population dynamics.

scholarly journals Efficient pedigree recording for fast population genetics simulation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Kelleher ◽  
Kevin R. Thornton ◽  
Jaime Ashanderf ◽  
Peter L. Ralph
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Genetic Material ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Whole Genome Sequence ◽  
Whole Genome ◽  
Storage Space ◽  
Efficiency Gains ◽  
Genetic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Neutral Mutations

AbstractIn this paper we describe how to efficiently record the entire genetic history of a population in forwards-time, individual-based population genetics simulations with arbitrary breeding models, population structure and demography. This approach dramatically reduces the computational burden of tracking individual genomes by allowing us to simulate only those loci that may affect reproduction (those having non-neutral variants). The genetic history of the population is recorded as a succinct tree sequence as introduced in the software package msprime, on which neutral mutations can be quickly placed afterwards. Recording the results of each breeding event requires storage that grows linearly with time, but there is a great deal of redundancy in this information. We solve this storage problem by providing an algorithm to quickly ‘simplify’ a tree sequence by removing this irrelevant history for a given set of genomes. By periodically simplifying the history with respect to the extant population, we show that the total storage space required is modest and overall large efficiency gains can be made over classical forward-time simulations. We implement a general-purpose framework for recording and simplifying genealogical data, which can be used to make simulations of any population model more efficient. We modify two popular forwards-time simulation frameworks to use this new approach and observe efficiency gains in large, whole-genome simulations of one to two orders of magnitude. In addition to speed, our method for recording pedigrees has several advantages: (1) All marginal genealogies of the simulated individuals are recorded, rather than just genotypes. (2) A population of N individuals with M polymorphic sites can be stored in O(N log N + M) space, making it feasible to store a simulation’s entire final generation as well as its history. (3) A simulation can easily be initialized with a more efficient coalescent simulation of deep history. The software for recording and processing tree sequences is named tskit.Author SummarySexually reproducing organisms are related to the others in their species by the complex web of parent-offspring relationships that constitute the pedigree. In this paper, we describe a way to record all of these relationships, as well as how genetic material is passed down through the pedigree, during a forwards-time population genetic simulation. To make effective use of this information, we describe both efficient storage methods for this embellished pedigree as well as a way to remove all information that is irrelevant to the genetic history of a given set of individuals, which dramatically reduces the required amount of storage space. Storing this information allows us to produce whole-genome sequence from simulations of large populations in which we have not explicitly recorded new genomic mutations; we find that this results in computational run times of up to 50 times faster than simulations forced to explicitly carry along that information.

scholarly journals Population genetics and evolutionary history of the wild rice species Oryza rufipogon and O. nivara in Sri Lanka

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (23) ◽  
pp. 12056-12065
Author(s):  
Salinda Sandamal ◽  
Asanka Tennakoon ◽  
Qing-Lin Meng ◽  
Buddhi Marambe ◽  
Disna Ratnasekera ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Wild Rice ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Oryza Rufipogon ◽  
Wild Rice Species ◽  
History Of

Population genetics and history of the introduced fire ant, Solenopsis invicta Buren (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), in Australia

2005 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T Henshaw ◽  
Nicole Kunzmann ◽  
Cas Vanderwoude ◽  
Matthias Sanetra ◽  
Ross H Crozier
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Solenopsis Invicta ◽  
Fire Ant ◽  
Solenopsis Invicta Buren ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals Endosymbiosis and its implications for evolutionary theory

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (33) ◽  
pp. 10270-10277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen A. O’Malley
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Population Genetic ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Explanation ◽  
Genetic Theory ◽  
Genetic Lineages ◽  
Explanatory Account ◽  
Lynn Margulis ◽  
History Of

Historically, conceptualizations of symbiosis and endosymbiosis have been pitted against Darwinian or neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. In more recent times, Lynn Margulis has argued vigorously along these lines. However, there are only shallow grounds for finding Darwinian concepts or population genetic theory incompatible with endosymbiosis. But is population genetics sufficiently explanatory of endosymbiosis and its role in evolution? Population genetics “follows” genes, is replication-centric, and is concerned with vertically consistent genetic lineages. It may also have explanatory limitations with regard to macroevolution. Even so, asking whether population genetics explains endosymbiosis may have the question the wrong way around. We should instead be asking how explanatory of evolution endosymbiosis is, and exactly which features of evolution it might be explaining. This paper will discuss how metabolic innovations associated with endosymbioses can drive evolution and thus provide an explanatory account of important episodes in the history of life. Metabolic explanations are both proximate and ultimate, in the same way genetic explanations are. Endosymbioses, therefore, point evolutionary biology toward an important dimension of evolutionary explanation.

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