Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
by Greg Mayer
Not only did we find much commendable in Andrew Sullivan’s coverage of the pollsters vs. pundits dispute, but Andrew has now taken to posting felid pictures, too! He’s always been a diehard goggieophile.
Plus, there’s relevance to readers of WEIT, or, even more so, Jerry’s first book, with Allen Orr, Speciation: the cichlid fishes of the Nicaraguan Great Lakes have undergone rapid diversification, and are the subject of studies of the process of speciation.
h/t Andrew Sullivan
by Greg Mayer
To give a little equal time to other trophic levels, this Saturday we have a meadow vole, a member of the rodent family Cricetidae.
Nicknamed ‘Voley’, this Microtus pennsylvanicus was rescued from a mechanical access shaft into which it had fallen and become trapped. What many people think of as ‘field mice’, and what many house cats bring home, are actually voles: they can be distinguished by their short tails, and smaller eyes and ears compared to other mice. Evolutionarily, meadow voles are known for being geographically variable, with many described subspecies, including a number restricted to small islands off the coast. Since most of these islands are land-bridge islands, isolated from the mainland only since the post-glacial rise in sea level, the differentiation of the voles inhabiting them is quite recent. The most distinctive of these small island derivatives of the meadow vole is a distinct species, the beach vole, Microtus breweri, found only on Muskeget, a very small island to the west of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. (My friend and colleague James ‘Skip’ Lazell calls it “defiantly” distinct from the meadow voles on nearby islands.) They have been isolated on Muskeget only 2000-3000 years, and are thus an example of rapid divergence. Jerry deals with the nature of species and species formation in chap. 7 of WEIT, and in much more detail in his 2004 monograph with H. Allen Orr, Speciation.
One of the good pieces in today’s New York Times is the article by Carol Yoon on speciation, “Genes offer new clues in old debate on species’ origin.” Maybe I’m biased, since speciation is my own area of research, but I think it’s nice that such an important area of evolutionary biology (after all, biodiversity requires both changes within lineages and the generation of new lineages) is singled out during Darwin Week. Carol’s article was inspired by my grand-student Daven Presgraves’s and his colleague Shanwu Tang’s new paper in Science describing a gene causing inviability in species hybrids. Tang and Presgraves found that two genes producing nucleoporins (proteins involved in transport of substances across the nuclear membrane) caused the death of hybrids between two species of fruit flies (Drosophila). Apparently the genes had diverged so much between the species that they do not work together when present together in the genome of a hybrid.
It is a surprise that nuceloporins would be involved in the death of species hybrids, and we have no idea why this happens. One of the areas of speciation that we know almost nothing about is which genes have diverged to produce the reproductive barriers between species. We know of only nine at present, all producing either the death or sterility of hybrids. And all of these genes bear, in their DNA, the traces of natural selection, so we can at least say that natural selection—as opposed to other evolutionary forces—was involved in this case of evolutionary divergence. My only quibble with this discussion is that Yoon repeatedly calls genes like this “speciation genes.” But we don’t know if these genes were actually involved in speciation: their divergence may have occurred after the reproductive barriers between species (which, after all, can be caused by divergence in mating behavior or ecological preference) had already evolved. That is, the sterility or death of hybrids may represent examples of POST-speciation evolution. Nevertheless, they are still quite interesting, because they can explain some of the regularities of evolution, such as “Haldane’s rule,” (the preferential death or sterility of those hybrids having sex chromosomes that are not alike—males in most species but females in birds and butterflies).
Kudos to Ms. Yoon for adhering to the biological species concept (BSC) in her article: the view that a “species” is a group of interbreeding organisms separated from other such groups by genetically enoded barriers to reproduction. There are many other species concepts, but none that has yielded a productive research program on speciation. As far as I know, every single paper studying the process of speciation in real organisms is concerned with studying the origin of reproductive barriers.
Massimo Pigliucci has reviewed WEIT in the latest issue of Science, a review you can find here. It’s a thoughtful, fair and–I’m glad to say–a positive review. But that issue of Science is also devoted to speciation, my own area of interest, and contains half a dozen good articles on the origin of species, both overviews and research articles. If you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’ll want to peruse this issue.
Massimo’s review also singles out for special praise one of the illustrations (the human, chimp, and A. afarensis given below) produced by the intrepid artist responsible for the book’s illustrations: Kalliopi Monoyios, whom I’d recommend to anyone needing a good scientific illustrator. Her webpage is here.
Human, Australopithecus, and chimpanzee.
CREDIT: © KALLIOPI MONOYIOS