speciation

From ScienceDaily: A research project has tested the hypothesis that Asian common toad populations across Southeast Asia are genetically similar owing to their commensal nature and high dispersive ability. To the researchers’ surprise, three genetically divergent groups of toads were found, each in a different geographic area (mainland Southeast Asia, coastal Myanmar and the islands of Java and Sumatra). The ranges of these three groups of toads were also found to have statistically different climates. This suggests that the toads may be adapting to local climatic conditions and evolving into separate species. Thus, toads of one group may not be able to disperse and persist within the range of another group because of climatic differences. More. Of course, we would Read More ›

See here (“Single jaw find shows three “species” to be one”), for example, and here (Science journalist discovers she is part Neanderthal). Oh and, Vince Torley notes “No debate about macroevolution? Surely you’re joking, Professor Coyne!” Surely, he isn’t joking. Darwin’s tenured flock have got on fine for many years without ever taking seriously the mess the whole concept is in. They can hardly take it seriouly anyway because it is central to the most influential academic book, Dawin;’s On the Origin of Species, which supposedly enshrines the single greatest idea anyone ever had, the foundation of their discipline. What’s mere plodding science compared to all that. And yet the concept is just one big mess right now. So big Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The Persian dwarf snake is wrongly classified as one species, scientists say. New research shows it is composed of six different species, a finding which might be important for the conservation of the snake. Well, the new finding might be important for the conservation of the snake but, together with many other instances, it isn’t doing much for a science-based use of the term “species.” That’s been noted here before. except for claiming instances of evolution right under our noses on weak evidence. The research, which was published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, revealed that the Persian dwarf snake is not a single species at all. It is composed of 6 different species, wrongly classified Read More ›

… but well, it’s Friday night … From LiveScience: Call them Franken flatworms. Scientists have created worms with the heads and brains of other species just by manipulating cell communication. The research is an example of how development is controlled by more than genetics alone. The researchers did not alter the flatworms’ DNA in any way, but instead manipulated proteins that control conversations between cells. The heads go back to normal after a few weeks. “These findings raise significant questions about how genes and bioelectric networks interact to build complex body structures,” Levin said. If genes provide a blueprint for an organism’s body, cells are like the construction workers required to turn the plan into a structure — and gap Read More ›

As noted earlier, the concept of “species” or “speciation,” as noted in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the most influential academic book ever written, is a mess. Of course no one admits that. And no one needs to be a scientist to see it either. Here, for example, from ScienceDaily: The discovery of a tiny, 170-million-year-old fossil on the Isle of Skye, off the north-west coast of the UK, has led researchers to conclude that three previously recognized species are in fact just one. Differences in tooth shape that had been thought to distinguish three different species were in fact all present in the single lower jaw found on the Isle of Skye. ‘In effect, we’ve “undiscovered” two species,’ Read More ›

From University of Oxford: As many as 50% of all natural history specimens held in the world’s museums could be wrongly named, according to a new study by researchers from Oxford University and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Researchers … scoured the records of Ipomoea – a large and diverse genus which includes the sweet potato – on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility database. Examining the names found on 49,500 specimens from the Americas, they found that 40% of these were outdated synonyms rather than the current name, and 16% of the names were unrecognisable or invalid. In addition, 11% of the specimens weren’t identified, being given only the name of the genus. The team thinks there are three main Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The fruit flies in question evolved into new species when they began laying their eggs and mating on apple trees, as opposed to their native hawthorn tree hosts. Three different kinds of parasitoid wasps were collected from a number of different fly host plant environments in the wild. Analyses in the lab showed that all three of the different kinds of wasps had diverged from others of the same kind, both genetically and with respect to host-associated physiology and behavior. “In a sense,” Smith said, “they have caught an entire community of parasitoids actively ecologically diverging in response to a historically documented host plant shift of their fly host.” These evolutionary changes, known as “sequential” or “cascading” events, Read More ›

By hybridization, if at all. Here: Interbreeding between animal species usually leads to offspring less vigorous than either parent—if they survive at all. But the combination of wolf, coyote and dog DNA that resulted from this reproductive necessity generated an exception. The consequence has been booming numbers of an extraordinarily fit new animal (see picture) spreading through the eastern part of North America. Some call this creature the eastern coyote. Others, though, have dubbed it the “coywolf”. Whatever name it goes by, Roland Kays of North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, reckons it now numbers in the millions. This has been going on for thousands of years. The different groups, wolves, dogs, and coyotes, each have differing advantages that usually Read More ›

A couple of weeks ago a friend forwarded me a link to this recent article about “ongoing research to record the interaction of environment and evolution” by University of California, Riverside biologist David Reznick. Reznick’s team has been studying adaptive changes in guppies. Reznick’s work focuses on tracking what happens in real-world situations in the wild, rather than the somewhat artificial environments in the lab. As a result, Reznick has gathered some of the more trustworthy and definitive data about changes over time in a real-world environment, largely free from the intervention and interference of the coated lab worker. The article states: The new work is part of research that Reznick has been doing since 1978. It involved transplanting guppies Read More ›

  Further to: Life continues to ignore what evolution experts say, where we discovered that big (plausible) changes can be produced through hybridization, we also learn, from ScienceDaily: Ancient hybridization key to domestic dog’s origin, wolf conservation efforts There are four to five wild species of Canis in North America, according to the overview. In addition to the well-known grey wolf and coyote, there is a secondary wild population of the domestic dog known as the Carolina dog, plus a few populations of hybrid origin with different proportions of wolf and coyote genes. Two of these hybrid populations, the red wolf of the eastern U.S. and the Algonquin wolf–also known as the Eastern or timber wolf–of southeastern Canada, have already Read More ›

If you listen to Darwinblather, you’d never think to ask. (As the rest of us face the road ahead. Yes, it is all as out of touch as it sounds.) Meanwhile: BEACON Researchers at Work: The Origin of a Species? [D]espite all the fantastic work done since Darwin’s day, speciation is still mysterious. Speciation is complex, multifaceted, tricky to study, and, most importantly, hard to “catch in the act.” It would help if we had a model system in which we could study speciation in fine detail as it occurs, examine and manipulate the processes involved, and to do so over a humanly reasonable time scale. More. In short, no one knows. But courts and governments demand public funding for Read More ›

Because Darwin. From Science Nordic: Both groups breed in the same area in the Caribbean, the Sargasso Sea, but typically you would expect a long-term physical separation of the two, to allow them to develop in different directions. This makes them a great mystery of evolution. Now scientists have solved this puzzle. It turns out that the eels became two species 3.5 million years ago, when Panama arose from the sea, separating the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. One group of eels were led to Europe by the Gulf Stream, where a new species emerged … The eel’s life story is difficult to understand from an evolutionary perspective. When they say “an evolutionary perspective,” they mean a Darwinian perspective, of course. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The team studied a plant-eating stick insect species from California called Timema cristinae known for its cryptic camouflage that allows it to hide from hungry birds, said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Samuel Flaxman. T. cristinae comes in several different types — one is green and blends in with the broad green leaves of a particular shrub species, while a second green variant sports a white, vertical stripe that helps disguise it on a different species of shrub with narrow, needle-like leaves. While Darwinian natural selection has begun pushing the two green forms of walking sticks down separate paths that could lead to the formation of two new species, the team found that a third melanistic, or brown variation of Read More ›

Darwin’s finches, we are told, have reached their limits on the Galapagos Islands From ScienceDaily: The evolution of birds on the Galapagos Islands, the cradle of Darwin’s theory of evolution, is a two-speed process. Most bird species are still diversifying, while the famous Darwin’s finches have already reached an equilibrium, in which new species can only appear when an existing one becomes extinct. This finding expands the classical theory on island evolution put forward in the 1960s. What? We haven’t even established how many “species” there are anyway, due to hybridization. Nonetheless, ‘The analysis shows that for the finches, diversity does indeed have a negative effect. There is no more room for new species, unless one of the existing species Read More ›

The local tax funded cult, it turns out, is safe. Here: Why Close Relatives Make Bad Neighbors Abstract The number of exotic plant species that have been introducedinto the United States far exceeds that of other groups of organisms, and many of these have become invasive. As in many regions of the globe, invasive members of the thistle tribe, Cardueae, are highly problematic in the California Floristic Province, an established biodiversity hotspot. While Darwin’s Naturalization Hypothesis posits that plantinvaders closely related to native species would be at a disadvantage, evidence has been found that introduced thistles more closely related to native species are more likely to become invasive. In order to elucidate the mechanisms behind this pattern, we modeled the Read More ›