Radiation and adaptation, evolutionary biology and semantics

Radiations can be either adaptive or non-adaptive, resulting in a variety of niches occupied by sympatric species, or in hardly any niche differentiation and species showing largely mosaic distribution patterns. The terms are useful despite the fact that intermediate situations occur.     

Molecular genetic mapping and plant evolutionary biology

With the advent of molecular genetic mapping, it is possible to study the genetic basis of natural heritable variation in new ways. Here, three potential uses of molecular genetic mapping in plant ecology and evolutionary biology are discussed; (1) accurate estimation of genetic parameters, (2) understanding speciation and/or adaptation, and (3) investigating whole genome organization. Basic methods for mapping genes and important mapping strategies are outlined. Recent studies are introduced to illustrate progress so far in applying the new methods in ecological and evolutionary research.     

An inquiry into the evolutionary status and apparent identity of San hunter-gatherers

An attempt is made to reconcile a popular view of the Bushmen or San of southern Africa with reality. Following an analysis of the assumed relationships of living hunter-gatherers with their Pleistocene forebears and modem neighbors, the identity of the San is explored using archaeological and historical evidence. Finally an alternative view of modern San, consistent with this evidence, is proposed.     

The Silk Road, Marco Polo, a Bible and its proteome: a detective story

Around the end of XIII century (at the time of young Marco Polo's first trip to China at the court of Khubilai Khan in Khan Baliq) a pocket Bible was delivered by a Franciscan friar to the Mogul Emperor, in the framework of the evangelization program of the Far East. Four centuries later, in 1685, this Bible was rediscovered by the Jesuit Philippe Couplet in the house of a rich Chinese in Nanchin and donated to Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. This Bible was recently "unearthed" in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, wrapped up in a precious yellow silk cloth, in a rather ruined state. After two years of restoration, the Bible will return to China in 2012 for a celebration of its >700years of life and of its remarkable return trip on the Silk Road. On account of the thinness of the parchment (barely 80μm thickness, the size of each foil being 16.5×11cm) it was widely held that the pages were produced from foetal lambskins. On tiny fragments of the margins of a foil, after several unsuccessful attempts at digesting the vellum, we were able to obtain a tryptic peptide mixture, which, upon mass spectrometry analysis, yielded the identity of 8 unique proteins, belonging to the genus Bos taurus, thus confirming the origin of the vellum from calfskins rather than from foetal lambskins. Our results prove that it is possible to obtain reliable protein extraction and IDs from ancient parchment documents.     

Development of in vitro fertilized embryos of the polyclad flatworm,Hoploplana inquilina,following blastomere separation and deletion

Summary After in vitro fertilization of naked eggs of the polyclad turbellarian, Hoploplana inquilina, both cell separation experiments and deletions of specific blastomeres are possible. With these techniques one can analyze the developmental potential of isolated blastomeres and determine if the embryonic axes have been established at the four-cell stage in this primitive, equally-cleaving spiralian embryo. Two-cell separation experiments with development of both halves resulted in pairs of larvae 1) neither of which had an eye (29%), 2) both of which had one eye (19%), and 3) one of which was eyeless and the other was one-eyed (43%). Deletion of one blastomere at the four-cell stage resulted in 68% one-eyed, 28% two-eyed and 3% eyeless larvae. The one-eyed larvae were asymmetric with respect to eye position with more having right than left eyes. Abnormal or missing ventrolateral lobes occurred with deletion of any of the macromeres at four cells but were significantly more common when A or C rather than B or D was deleted. The experiments support the hypothesis that eye development is a consequence of cytoplasmic localization of both a specific eye precursor and an inducer which segregate independently of cleavage planes, and indicate that the embryonic axes have been determined at the four-cell stage.     

Comparative genomics and evolutionary biology

Data of large-scale DNA sequencing are relevant to some of the most fundamental issues in evolutionary biology: suboptimality, homology, hierarchy, ancestry, novelties, the role of natural selection, and the relative importance of directional versus stabilizing selection. Already, these data provided the best available evidence for some evolutionary phenomena, and in several cases led to refinement of old concepts. Still, the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm will successfully accommodate comparative genomics.     

新疆塔什库尔干自然保护区马可波罗盘羊种群数量和栖息地初步调查

2005 年7 ～8 月我们在塔什库尔干自然保护区对马可波罗盘羊的种群数量进行了调查。首先走访当地居民和保护区工作人员,确定盘羊分布范围,然后根据地形和水系,将调查区域分为Ⅰ、Ⅱ、Ⅲ、Ⅳ 4 个区。在每个调查区域沿河谷和沟谷设置随机样线,步行、骑马或开车沿样线搜寻盘羊,记录群体数量、年龄、性别、栖息地类型。通过调查以盘羊所在地为中心、直径200 m 的圆形样方中的地形和生态因子,确定盘羊利用的栖息地特征值,建立马可波罗盘羊对栖息地利用的模型。以1∶50 000 的地形图建立调查地区的数字高程模型(DEM), 用ArcView3.2 的spatial analyst 模块进行空间模拟与分析,计算出马可波罗盘羊分布区内符合模型中的海拔、坡度、坡向等要求的空间的范围和面积。通过计算每个调查地区的种群密度、适宜栖息地面积等数据,获得种群数量估计值,进而得到保护区内马可波罗盘羊的种群数量的估计值。调查结果表明,马可波罗盘羊分布在保护区西部达布达尔乡的皮斯岭、卡拉其古、赞坎沟等帕米尔高原地区;种群总数在1 500 ～ 1 700 只;保护区内盘羊分布面积为4 012.17 km² ,适宜栖息地面积只有641.16 km² ,可利用的栖息地仅482.67km²,仅占分布区的12.03% 。过牧、栖息地破坏、非法狩猎、疫病和交流障碍是盘羊生存的主要威胁因子。建议通过调整保护区边界、恢复栖息地、防止疫病、加强宣传、开展多边合作等措施来加强马可波罗盘羊的保护问题。     

Colour spaces in ecology and evolutionary biology

The recognition that animals sense the world in a different way than we do has unlocked important lines of research in ecology and evolutionary biology. In practice, the subjective study of natural stimuli has been permitted by perceptual spaces, which are graphical models of how stimuli are perceived by a given animal. Because colour vision is arguably the best‐known sensory modality in most animals, a diversity of colour spaces are now available to visual ecologists, ranging from generalist and basic models allowing rough but robust predictions on colour perception, to species‐specific, more complex models giving accurate but context‐dependent predictions. Selecting among these models is most often influenced by historical contingencies that have associated models to specific questions and organisms; however, these associations are not always optimal. The aim of this review is to provide visual ecologists with a critical perspective on how models of colour space are built, how well they perform and where their main limitations are with regard to their most frequent uses in ecology and evolutionary biology. We propose a classification of models based on their complexity, defined as whether and how they model the mechanisms of chromatic adaptation and receptor opponency, the nonlinear association between the stimulus and its perception, and whether or not models have been fitted to experimental data. Then, we review the effect of modelling these mechanisms on predictions of colour detection and discrimination, colour conspicuousness, colour diversity and diversification, and for comparing the perception of colour traits between distinct perceivers. While a few rules emerge (e.g. opponent log–linear models should be preferred when analysing very distinct colours), in general model parameters still have poorly known effects. Colour spaces have nonetheless permitted significant advances in ecology and evolutionary biology, and more progress is expected if ecologists compare results between models and perform behavioural experiments more routinely. Such an approach would further contribute to a better understanding of colour vision and its links to the behavioural ecology of animals. While visual ecology is essentially a transfer of knowledge from visual sciences to evolutionary ecology, we hope that the discipline will benefit both fields more evenly in the future.     

Ecology and evolutionary biology of fishing bats

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Popper, falsifiability, and evolutionary biology

First, a brief history is provided of Popper's views on the status of evolutionary biology as a science. The views of some prominent biologists are then canvassed on the matter of falsifiability and its relation to evolutionary biology. Following that, I argue that Popper's programme of falsifiability does indeed exclude evolutionary biology from within the circumference of genuine science, that Popper's programme is fundamentally incoherent, and that the correction of this incoherence results in a greatly expanded and much more realistic concept of what is empirical, resulting in the inclusion of evolutionary biology. Finally, this expanded concept of empirical is applied to two particular problems in evolutionary biology — viz., the species problem and the debate over the theory of punctuated equilibria — and it is argued that both of them are still mainly metaphysical.     

Social traits,social networks and evolutionary biology

The social environment is both an important agent of selection for most organisms, and an emergent property of their interactions. As an aggregation of interactions among members of a population, the social environment is a product of many sets of relationships and so can be represented as a network or matrix. Social network analysis in animals has focused on why these networks possess the structure they do, and whether individuals’ network traits, representing some aspect of their social phenotype, relate to their fitness. Meanwhile, quantitative geneticists have demonstrated that traits expressed in a social context can depend on the phenotypes and genotypes of interacting partners, leading to influences of the social environment on the traits and fitness of individuals and the evolutionary trajectories of populations. Therefore, both fields are investigating similar topics, yet have arrived at these points relatively independently. We review how these approaches are diverged, and yet how they retain clear parallelism and so strong potential for complementarity. This demonstrates that, despite separate bodies of theory, advances in one might inform the other. Techniques in network analysis for quantifying social phenotypes, and for identifying community structure, should be useful for those studying the relationship between individual behaviour and group‐level phenotypes. Entering social association matrices into quantitative genetic models may also reduce bias in heritability estimates, and allow the estimation of the influence of social connectedness on trait expression. Current methods for measuring natural selection in a social context explicitly account for the fact that a trait is not necessarily the property of a single individual, something the network approaches have not yet considered when relating network metrics to individual fitness. Harnessing evolutionary models that consider traits affected by genes in other individuals (i.e. indirect genetic effects) provides the potential to understand how entire networks of social interactions in populations influence phenotypes and predict how these traits may evolve. By theoretical integration of social network analysis and quantitative genetics, we hope to identify areas of compatibility and incompatibility and to direct research efforts towards the most promising areas. Continuing this synthesis could provide important insights into the evolution of traits expressed in a social context and the evolutionary consequences of complex and nuanced social phenotypes.     

Hunter-gatherer energetics and fertility: A reassessment of the !Kung San

This paper examines the question of why the total fertility rate of the !Kung San hunter-gatherers of the Northern Kalahari desert is as low as 4.69 births. When the intermediate variables involved are examined through the employment of a reproductive equation, it becomes clear that low fecundity is a major issue. Arguments offered previously to explain the low fertility of !Kung women, depending on factors such as nutrition, health status, and lactational practices are insufficient. Drawing upon recent data from sports medicine and endocrinology, I suggest that the pattern of San female energetics in their gathering and subsistence routine has a direct effect upon their fecundity. Such a correlation between activity patterns, endocrine function, and reproductive capacity may also be important for understanding the fertility of other mobile hunter-gatherer groups.     

小型哺乳动物生理生态学研究与进化思想

动物生理生态学是一门利用生理学的手段和方法研究与动物的生存和繁殖相关的生态学问题的交叉学科,
旨在阐明动物对环境适应和进化的生理机制。在近70 年的发展历程中,进化生物学的思想和理论越来越紧密地
融入到生理生态学的研究中,同时生理生态学的研究结果也在充实着进化生物学理论的发展。本文根据作者多
年的研究经历,从动物的体型和代谢特征、消化生理、生态免疫和冬眠等几个侧面,简述了小型哺乳动物生理
生态学的某些研究进展和进化思想对该领域的影响。     

Special Issue ofHuman evolution on intelligence and evolutionary biology

This is a Special Issue on intelligence and evolutionary biology, based on selected lectures at a NATO Advanced Study Institute on this topic. The proceedings of the ASI have been published in a separate volume. The papers presented here have been reviewed and updated to reflect information available in 1988.     

Toward an integration of evolutionary biology and ecosystem science

At present, the disciplines of evolutionary biology and ecosystem science are weakly integrated. As a result, we have a poor understanding of how the ecological and evolutionary processes that create, maintain, and change biological diversity affect the flux of energy and materials in global biogeochemical cycles. The goal of this article was to review several research fields at the interfaces between ecosystem science, community ecology and evolutionary biology, and suggest new ways to integrate evolutionary biology and ecosystem science. In particular, we focus on how phenotypic evolution by natural selection can influence ecosystem functions by affecting processes at the environmental, population and community scale of ecosystem organization. We develop an eco-evolutionary model to illustrate linkages between evolutionary change (e.g. phenotypic evolution of producer), ecological interactions (e.g. consumer grazing) and ecosystem processes (e.g. nutrient cycling). We conclude by proposing experiments to test the ecosystem consequences of evolutionary changes.     

The evolutionary and ecological role of heat shock proteins

Most heat shock proteins (Hsp) function as molecular chaperones that help organisms to cope with stress of both an internal and external nature. Here, we review the recent evidence of the relationship between stress resistance and inducible Hsp expression, including a characterization of factors that induce the heat shock response and a discussion of the associated costs. We report on studies of stress resistance including mild stress, effects of high larval densities, inbreeding and age on Hsp expression, as well as on natural variation in the expression of Hsps. The relationship between Hsps and life history traits is discussed with special emphasis on the ecological and evolutionary relevance of Hsps. It is known that up‐regulation of the Hsps is a common cellular response to increased levels of non‐native proteins that facilitates correct protein folding/refolding or degradation of non‐functional proteins. However, we also suggest that the expression level of Hsp in each species and population is a balance between benefits and costs, i.e. a negative impact on growth, development rate and fertility as a result of overexpression of Hsps. To date, investigations have focused primarily on the Hsp70 family. There is evidence that representatives of this Hsp family and other molecular chaperones play significant roles in relation to stress resistance. Future studies including genomic and proteonomic analyses will increase our understanding of molecular chaperones in stress research.     

20世纪下半叶上海城市景观镶嵌结构演变的数量特征与分形结构模型研究

以上海中心城区为空间范围,以RS和GIS为技术手段,运用多样指数、优势度、破碎度、分离度等指标,研究20世纪下半叶以来上海城市景观镶嵌结构及其演变的数量特征;运用分形理论建立各种景观形态的分形结构模型,以分维数为依据分析各种景观形态的复杂性;基于GIS的空间分析功能,探讨影响景观格局及其演变的主要因素。研究结果表明:(1)上海城市景观的空间扩展,在空间上和时间都是不均匀;(2)随着时间的推移,景观多样性和破碎度变大。优势度变小;(3)住宅、工矿和其它城市景观的分离度明显地呈减小趋势,农田和村镇的分离度呈增大趋势,道路和河流水域的分离度变化幅度不大;(4)各种景观斑块形态的复杂性程度(分维数的平均值)排序为:道路>河流水域>农田>住宅>村镇>工矿>在建景观>其它城市景观;(5)从各种景观形态的演变过程来看,住宅斑块形态逐渐趋于复杂化,斑其块形态的分维数呈缓慢地增大趋势;工矿、道路、其它城市景观、农田、村镇等五种景观斑块形态的变化,经历了由简单到复杂,再到简单的变化过程,其分维数在1947-1988年期间呈增大趋势,1988年时增至最大,随后开始逐渐减小;(6)影响上海城市景观格局及其演变的因素主要包括河流廊道、原有基础、交通廊道、经济发展、规划控制等几个方面。     

The female orgasm and the homology concept in evolutionary biology

The definition of homology and its application to reproductive structures, external genitalia, and the physiology of sexual pleasure has a tortuous history. While nowadays there is a consensus on the developmental homology of genital and reproductive systems, there is no agreement on the physiological translation, or the evolutionary origination and roles, of these structural correspondences and their divergent histories. This paper analyzes the impact of evolutionary perspectives on the homology concept as applied to the female orgasm, and their consequences for the biological and social understanding of female sexuality and reproduction. After a survey of the history of pre-evolutionary biomedical views on sexual difference and sexual pleasure, we examine how the concept of sexual homology was shaped in the new phylogenetic framework of the late 19th century. We then analyse the debates on the anatomical locus of female pleasure at the crossroads of theories of sexual evolution and new scientific discourses in psychoanalysis and sex studies. Moving back to evolutionary biology, we explore the consequences of neglecting homology in adaptive explanations of the female orgasm. The last two sections investigate the role played by different articulations of the homology concept in evolutionary developmental explanations of the origin and evolution of the female orgasm. These include the role of sexual, developmental homology in the byproduct hypothesis, and a more recent hypothesis where a phylogenetic, physiological concept of homology is used to account for the origination of the female orgasm. We conclude with a brief discussion on the social implications for the understanding of female pleasure derived from these different homology frameworks.     

Pharmacology,genomics, and the evolutionary biology of ageing

Aging is a multifold process affected by many genes and thus many biochemical pathways. This conclusion is underscored by the failure to find simple central controls for the aging process during the 20th Century. This situation poses a fundamental challenge to anti-aging medicine: how to develop effective therapies for a genomically complex pathology. We propose such a strategy. As a first step, we recommend the use of model systems in which significant genetic intervention is not proscribed or impractical. Second, we propose that work with such model systems begin with selected lines that have genetic enhancements that allow increased lifespan. Third, genomic methods should be used to identify a number of biochemical pathways for increasing lifespan. Fourth, biochemical pathways that have been identified in model systems would then be available for pharmaceutical development, first in rodents, eventually in a clinical human population. This may seem to be a cumbersome R&D strategy, but starting with human populations or inadequately pre-screened compounds would be unlikely to succeed because of the complexity of the aging problem.